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Research examining how schoolteachers have been represented in the news is scarce. This is noteworthy, given the recognition that the news media has an influential agenda-setting function, plays a pivotal role in shaping public opinion, and can influence educational policy. Indeed, there is a view amongst some authorities that education policy and news media coverage are irrevocably interconnected. Specifically in relation to newspapers, research indicates that their coverage can be particularly influential in informing and influencing public debate and policy about a variety of educational issues. Research has also been conducted on the reactions of teachers, reporting that they perceive news media coverage as important in shaping public opinion and education policy, as well as affecting their relationships with families, friends, and the community. Teachers in various countries have also expressed frustration at what they have perceived as a negative focus in coverage. Furthermore, news media coverage has been seen to play a role to the decline in the status of teaching that has been documented by researchers from many developed countries over the past three decades. It has been claimed that contemporary news media coverage has led to greater scrutiny and criticism of the teaching profession than ever before, with educators increasingly having to explain and justify their work. In addition to the widespread concern about the decline in the status of teaching, many countries are experiencing ongoing teacher recruitment and retention problems. Despite this, very few studies have considered how schoolteachers and teaching as a profession are depicted in the news media. Particularly scarce are investigations with a historical dimension. This book helps fill the gap by examining the reporting in The West Australian newspaper, one of the oldest newspapers in Australia and a daily publication since 1885. It is offered as a contribution towards rectifying the deficit in the corpus of work on how newspapers have depicted teachers and points the way towards one of a number of avenues of research that other scholars in the field could take for various contexts (including different countries) and time periods. The specific aim of the study is to provide a historical analysis of The West Australian newspaper s representation of teachers over two decades. To that end, it examines the portrayal of teachers in its reporting of five major educational developments in the state of Western Australia that were the subject of sustained coverage at various times between 1987 and 2007: unit curriculum (1987 1989), industrial dispute (1995), standardised testing (1997 2001), teacher shortage (1997 2007), and outcomes-based education (2005 2007). Although the study focused on The West Australian newspaper, the topics chosen reflect the international trends and universal issues in education. Each of the topics in the study is located within the broader context of related developments internationally, and especially in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Three key representations of teachers are identified: negative representations, sympathetic representations, and positive representations. The negative representations refer to coverage which is overtly critical of teachers such as reporting which condemns teachers for taking industrial action, the sympathetic representations relate to reporting which typically presents teachers as stressed, overburdened and powerless; and the positive representations show teachers as valued by the community and devoted to their students and work. The central argument of the study is that The West Australian s coverage was dominated by both negative and sympathetic representations of schoolteachers, while positive representations were relatively rare. Overall, the coverage presented a less flattering image of teachers than that which emerges from the educational research literature, yet it provided a more balanced presentation of teachers than the extremes of hero and villain which tend to dominate popular culture. Its portrayal of teachers was generally consistent with that of other news media, with a movement towards a more sympathetic treatment in recent reporting reflecting a trend also identified in contemporary British newspaper coverage. Although the sympathetic coverage did recognize the challenges faced by teachers, it consistently presented teaching as a profession in a negative light. Across the coverage, there was almost a total absence of voices defending teaching or presenting it as an attractive career option. In addition, comments of any type from individual teachers were rare. Overall, the book highlights the need for key media spokespeople in education politicians, union representatives, bureaucrats and academics to consider carefully the messages they want to send regarding teachers and teaching. It also points to implications for journalism education and journalism practice. This book should be read by those working in the fields of educational policy, journalism education, media studies, and history of education internationally, particularly those working in these fields in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.

Sexuality is often perceived as shameful, for the dangers it potentially precipitates rape, incest, exploitation, cruelty, and humiliation often outweigh its pleasures. Essentialist arguments surrounding sexuality have historically cast the subject as taboo, and even within relationships where sex is sanctioned namely heterosexual marital relationships it is often a difficult subject to navigate and negotiate. Over the last thirty years, feminist, postcolonial and queer theorists have interrogated the ways in which sexuality is conceptualized and constructed, specifically with the intention of deconstructing essentialist notions of sexuality and identity formation. Yet, while recent theoretical interventions have re-situated sexuality as a historical and social category allowing us to see how ideas about sexuality are linked to forms of power and other hegemonic categories of identity and subjectivity like class, race, gender and nationality sexuality remains a contentious subject. Debates surrounding the politics and problems of pleasure still proliferate within the academy, and in contemporary popular culture and society the pervasiveness of moral panics concerning the sexualisation or pornographication of Western cultures indicate that sexuality remains an elusive and complex topic, and one that requires continued critical reflection. A review of recent scholarship investigating the cultural representation of sexuality, work that pays specific attention to the imaginary and the expressive, reveals that much critical attention has tended to focus on film, theatre, and the visual arts rather than literature. While this is not surprising given the dominance of visual culture in today s media-saturated societies around the world, literature and written discourse will continue to play a central role in determining how we understand and define our (sexual) selves as long as there are literate populations. This collection seeks to close a gap in current critical scholarship by attending precisely to the nexus between sexuality and literature of the contemporary moment. It contends that reading, not just viewing, informs how we think of ourselves as sexual beings, and that literature and the written realm of the imagination remains an important outlet for the expression and exploration of sexual desire, sexual acts, sexual being, sexual identity and sexual interaction. In critically examining the plural representations of sexuality in contemporary literature, this book has a distinctly global emphasis, containing essays that interrogate sexuality in the work of not only a number of mainstream American and British writers but also less well-known writers from New Zealand and Canada. All of the chapters owe primary intellectual and theoretical debts to three broad and overlapping domains of critical scholarship and practice: feminism, queer theory, and postcolonial studies. As the first critical collection of essays to consider the representation of sexuality across such a wide variety of contemporary writing, Sexuality and Contemporary Literature analytically foregrounds insights into the historical and current arrangements of sexuality that contemporary literature provides, while also inviting the reader to imagine other possibilities for the future that literary texts open up. Sexuality and Contemporary Literature is an important book for literary and cultural studies collections.

Australian poetry is popularly conceived as a tradition founded by the wry, secular and stoic strains of its late-nineteenth-century bush balladeers Adam Lindsay Gordon, Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, consolidated into a land-based vigour in publications such as the Bulletin. Yet this popular conception relies on not actually consulting the poetry itself, which for well over one hundred and fifty years has been cerebral, introspective, feminine and highly even experimentally religious. Western Christian mystics and Western Christian mystical poets of the classical world, Middle Ages and modern era have been sources of inspiration, influence and correspondence for Australian poets since the writings of Charles Harpur (1813 1868), but there have also been ongoing debates as to how mysticism might be defined, whom its true exemplars might be, and whether poets should be considered mystical authorities. This book dedicates whole chapters to five Australian Christian mystical poets: Ada Cambridge (1864 1926), John Shaw Neilson (1872 1943), Francis Webb (1925 1973), Judith Wright (1915 2000) and Kevin Hart (1954 - ), with additional contextual chapters on their contemporaries and new approaches by Aboriginal poets since the early 1990s. Scholars and students are increasingly disregarding the popular bush facade and reading Australian poetry in terms of the sacred, the philosophical, the contemplative and the transcendent. At a national level this can be traced back to the post-war and 1970s generations of poets and readers who rejected the safe old bush myths for a more relentless interrogation of Australian origins, environments and metaphysics. Yet internationally, as among the general Australian public, the very idea of an Australian Christian mystical poetry seems incongruous with a metaphysically weak bush tradition which asks very little of them. This book casts Australian poetry in a new light by showing how Australian Christian mystical poetics can be found in every era of Australian letters, how literary hostilities towards women poets, eroticism and contemplation served to stifle a critical appreciation of mystical poetics until recent decades, and how in the twentieth century one Australian Christian mystical poet began to influence another and share their appreciations of Dante, Donne, Traherne, Blake, Wordsworth, Bront , Rossetti, Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot and Lowell. Despite parallel international works on British, American and European Christian mystical poets, there has never been a book-length exploration of Australian Christian mystical poets or poetics. This study draws upon eight years of research to not only consider debates around Christian mysticism during the lives of its selected poets, but to also frame its argument in terms of the twenty-first-century Christian mysticism scholarship of Kevin Hart, Amy Hollywood, Ursula King and Bernard McGinn s seminal multi-volume history of Western Christian mysticism, The Presence of God. Simultaneously, Australian literary criticism of the relevant eras as well as in the present are explicitly engaged throughout. This book is a rigorous work of original scholarship which will significantly impact future discussions on the possibilities of Australian literature.

This book is a comprehensive compilation of results from eight major research reports released in 2012 by the Pew Research Center and Elon University. In The Future of the Internet Survey V, more than 1,000 experts shared their views as they imagined the future of the Internet and: the always-on, hyperconnected generation in their teens-to-20s by 2020; the mobile Web, HTML5, and native apps; e-money, mobile wallets, and financial transactions through near-field communication; gamification--the influence of game mechanics implemented for interactivity and engagement; "e;smart systems"e; and the evolution of more efficient homes; corporate responsibility in the digital age; the influence of "e;Big Data"e; in the cloud; and the future of higher education.

By the 1820s, falling book prices and rising literacy rates had created England s first literate working-class majority. These workers had read other people s lives. They had read the histories of heroes and histories of philosophers as one artisan author puts it, but they looked in vain for an autobiography of a fellow wealth producer. Those who were born in the 1790s shared a revolutionary generation with Byron, Shelley and Keats, and they had seen their country s industrialization first hand. Their lives were radically different than the lives their parents had lived, and they knew that they had their own stories to tell. Between 1820 and the defeat of Chartism in 1848, forty-eight men and women wrote or spoke their autobiographies, commemorating in their own words the cultural transition that accompanied England s shift to an industrial capitalist economy. The outpouring of working-class lives was so dramatic that John Lockhart, writing in the Quarterly Review despaired that England expect[ed] every driveller to do his Memorabilia. In Literature by the Working Class, Cassandra Falke provides a close literary analysis of five of these autobiographies, situating them in their historical and literary context but privileging each as a work of literature that deserves the same careful attention readers pay to other literary texts of the period. She has chosen works that represent the diversity of working-class life. One author, John Clare, so excelled at poetry that his work is now widely anthologized, but he was born an agricultural laborer, and he died in a madhouse. Another, Robert Blincoe, was orphaned at birth and sold into the nightmarish factory apprentice system. His contemporary, Timothy Claxton, was a gardener s boy in the service of a great house. The lady of the house provided two years of education for him, and on that slim foundation, he built a successful career as a whitesmith and founded London s first mechanic s institute. Christopher s Thomson trained as a shipwright, rambled the country as an actor and scene painter, and shuffled his wife and children from job to job and town to town until he finally settled down as a house painter. He rejects the social pressure to define his life according to his occupation and writes instead about pleasure, personal trials and community. The last autobiographer Falke considers, Thomas Carter, struggled to fulfill the period s ideal for a working-class autodidact. From his overcrowded London garret apartment, in the voice of the anonymous working man, he encouraged fellow workers to persist in their education, and to maintain hope in the freedom of an active mental life even as their families, like his, struggled with hunger, cold, and child mortality. Viewing all of these stories together, Falke captures the richness of working-class culture, the bravery of these authors persistence, and the fecundity of their literary imaginations. Literature by the Working Class proposes a way to read working-class autobiographies that attends to both the socio-historical influences on their composition and their value as individual literary works. Although social historians, reading historians, and historians of rhetoric have recognized the significance of working-class autobiography to the early nineteenth century, providing broad overviews of the genre, very little work has been done to read these works as literature. Part of this negligence arises for the style of these autobiographies. They reject notions of autonomous selfhood and linear self-creation that characterize other Romantic period autobiographical works. While the critical understanding of autobiography as a narrative of rational progress toward occupational success and autonomous selfhood has been challenged by scholars working in a variety of periods and disciplines (feminist scholars, African-American scholars, early modern scholars, for example), nineteenth-century accounts of autobiography have yet to fully rewrite this master narrative, and thus have yet to account for an abundance of writing by workers. Working-class autobiographies have also been neglected because these authors learned that emotional expression and literary embellishment were not luxuries permitted for their class. In response, they write with the objective distance they imagine their readers to expect, or they record the difficulty of not feeling free to write their emotions. Their books, therefore, do not confirm the usual expectations for autobiography in the Romantic period. Falke argues that the historical limits placed on working-class authors inspired them to try inventive literary techniques such as non-narrative autobiographies, non-chronological structure, and symbolic plots techniques that autobiographers are being lauded for experimenting with today. Instead of looking for textual properties that working-class autobiographies share with more canonical works, she reads the ways that these texts re-imagine what autobiography can do. Not only does this kind of reading yield valuable insights about the texts themselves, it also helps revise and expand the understanding of the development of this crucial nineteenth-century form.

Edgar Allan Poe is a Romantic writer whose main aim in writing even in his so-called Gothic tales has been the deciphering of the soul and a fascination with the workings of the unconscious. As a post-enlightenment believer in the language of dreams, he experimented new ways of discovering the self. His practice shared a lot with and provided a rich soil for what was to be called analytical psychology. Edgar Allan Poe: An Archetypal Reading, while ostensibly attempting to read Poe s writings by way of archetypal models, takes the confident critical stance of resisting being limited by a singular--Jungian -approach, even though this would have been a convenient, even expected, route to take. The psychological or Freudian approach, which provides one major framework of interpreting symbols, has already been applied to Poe, with its own contribution and limitation, but in this book Poe is studied from an archetypal perspective. This approach is also used to deal with symbols in a framework, but the structure is more extensive because it attempts to address symbols not as symptoms in pathological cases but as normal phenomena in life. In a critical climate that sees scholarship mired in the feet-dragging obsession with arriving at originality and theoretical novelty, the present book s ability to retain its critical focus is evidence of a disciplined scholarly mind. Zarei carefully acknowledges the tradition out of which the adopted methodology emerges, and he is also mindful of the complexities and problematics that form a kind of critical baggage. The book navigates this complicated discourse with ease which is a testament of the author s mastery over the subject, as well as the primary material. The introductory chapter is convincing in its description of the archetypal approach, presenting its relationship to other, similar critical modes and therefore addressing the criticism that such an approach is old-fashioned. The organization of the book by aspects of the mythic tradition -heroism, journey and return -reinforces its purpose; these thematic elements apply to virtually the whole history of narrative writing. Therefore, the analysis locates Poe in a mythic-epic tradition rather than merely pointing out archetypal elements to a less clear purpose. Cultural and political concerns are incorporated persuasively into the argument. The choice of primary material covers the range of Poe s writings and provides an accurate representation of his body of work as they are mapped onto the archetypal models proposed in this book, thereby validating the models as more than mere conceptual ideas. The book makes a substantial contribution because it will be helpful to anyone interested in post-Jungian readings of Poe. Given that a substantial cohort of Poe critics employ psychoanalytic techniques, largely Freudian, these chapters should be a useful edition to the accumulated wisdom about an American Romantic author. Edgar Allan Poe: An Archetypal Reading is a useful addition to collections in American literature.

From the time Singapore gained self-government, both girls and boys have been given equal opportunities in education. This access to education has resulted in increased female literacy and improved social and economic status for women. However, in spite of this improvement, women s gender ideologies remain conservative and patriarchal. The school is an ideological apparatus of the state and this study examines how the education system has been used to influence the construction of femininity in school, thus maintaining the state s hegemony and preservation of a patriarchal framework in Singapore. It seeks to explore two questions: how the concept of femininity is constructed in the school curriculum and whether education for girls has empowered women or if it actually has entrapped them in subordination and maintenance of the patriarchal structure of society. In doing so, the author examines the gender ideology of the ruling elite through an analysis of its discourse on women and education. This will provide an understanding of the motivations behind policies such as equal educational opportunities for girls, and will highlight the primacy of pragmatic considerations of national economic advancement. At the same time, issues of subject choice and sex-differentiated curriculum as well as the embedding of gender ideology in curricular materials and school disciplinary codes are also examined in the light of how the concept of femininity is constructed in the school curriculum. A number of studies have focused on Singapore women s lives and careers, including their struggle to maintain coherence in their roles as career women on the one hand, and wives, and mothers on the other. What has not been examined is the school s role in the girls construction of femininity. The school, as the ideological apparatus of the state plays an important role in socializing girls to the norms, beliefs and value systems of the Singapore society. It is important to examine the state s gender ideologies and how such ideologies are transmitted via the education system. Gender messages are embedded in the formal and informal school curricula and these play an important part in children s construction of their gender identities. It has been assumed that because girls and boys are given equal opportunities in education, there are no important gender issues in the sphere of education. This book questions such an assumption and problematizes the role of education as a liberating force for women to investigate if education has indeed liberated women or entrapped them in subordination in a patriarchal society. This is the first comprehensive study of the impact of girls education on their construction of their gender identity. The author shows that women play an important but subordinate role in Singapore, be it in the economic, political or social sphere, and the government s support for equal opportunities for girls is based on pragmatic economic considerations and not on adherence to any dogma or theory. This gender ideology that is reflected in the education policies and curricula for schoolgirls emphasized patriarchal values and upheld traditional feminine virtues such as gentleness, docility and submissiveness. At the same time education and curricular policies encouraged girls to study the hard sciences, like the boys. All these have resulted in the construction of a dual role for women in both the economic and domestic spheres. The study also shows that for many years, education for girls had entrapped them in constructing a gender identity that upheld a patriarchal social structure. However, since the turn of the century, this construct has unraveled as the provision of modern education, especially in science and technology and the opportunities for employment have enabled women to become independent in many senses of the word, and this has brought about changes in society s gender ideology. The Construction of Femininity in a Postcolonial State: Girls Education in Singapore is an important book for any collection on gender and education. Educationists and the general public would find this study an enlightening read because it raises awareness about the importance of the role of education in the construction of gender identities.

Plato (ca. 427 ca. 347 BCE), the preeminent Greek philosopher, has been extensively studied. A major field of Plato s comprehensive work is his political philosophy, which is multifaceted and multidimensional. The discourse on gender issues forms an integral part of it. In this context, one is surprised to notice that Plato s elaborations have been interpreted in quite contrasting ways. In some feminist discussions of classical philosophy, Plato s intellectual enterprise is evaluated as reflecting Greek male chauvinism. Such identification carries all manner of stereotyping, and this is neither enlightening nor helpful for an overall understanding of Plato s teachings and his world of ideas. In the scholarly literature, one can make the surprising discovery that Plato s contribution to the understanding of gender roles in society slips the attention of authors who specialize in this topic. Plato was neither feminist in the modern sense nor a sexist. Plato was not a liberal thinker, and he did not take the initiative to make a case for women s liberties. And yet, he elaborates amply on issues of what is subsumed under women s liberation in our time: What else would we call a philosopher who, under the conditions of Greek society in the classical age, advocated for the participation of women in sports competitions and approved of the access of women to public offices, even to political leadership? In this study, priority lies in reconstructing Plato s ideas on women s roles viewed against the zeitgeist of gender issues in Greek society of classical antiquity. The analysis shows that Plato s speculations about gender and gender issues in an ideal society were nothing short of revolutionary. What has been produced up to the present regarding Plato's positions on the agenda of gender are disparate studies whose scope falls short of the whole range of angles from which Plato himself approached the issues, and the study of gender issues in Plato has remained unsystematic so far. In this book Plato on Women, Harald Haarmann provides the first systematic analysis of Plato's positions on gender and the role of women in an ideal society. The intention is to achieve a balance in the investigation of Plato's dialogues and to fill gaps by highlighting those texts that have remained understudied, Plato's last dialogue Nomoi ("e;Laws"e;) in particular. This text, the longest of Plato's dialogues, is now considered, together with the Politeia ("e;Republic"e;), to range among the most important sources of Plato's political theory. The introduction of the Laws, which make up about one fifth of Plato's work, into the comparative study of Plato's philosophical enterprise does not only contribute to an enrichment of the whole text corpus but also provides the possibility to broaden the perspective on particular topics, women's roles in society, for one. The ways in which Plato elaborates on women's roles illustrates that, in light of his concept of true justice, gender issues become detached from the contemporary clich of "e;natural law"e; by which women's status in society was allegedly determined. In this book, a new approach to Plato's philosophical endeavor is presented, one which calls upon an internal reconstruction of historical realities and of cultural conditions during Plato's lifetime, and of its zeitgeist, at the same time avoiding judgmental stereotyping and the forceful projection of modern biased positions into antiquity. Here, Plato's mature reflections on gender equality in an ideal society are contrasted with the real mirror image of women's role in Greek society of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. The present reconstruction is intended as a contribution, on the one hand, to identify the cultural embedding of Plato's enterprise and, on the other hand, to specify the typical markers of Platonic philosophy. Readers may discover a "e;new"e; Plato. Plato on Women is a major contribution to political philosophy and gender studies as well as an important book for collections of Plato's works and scholarly literature focusing on this philosopher.

The twenty years since 1995 have seen their share of landmark events. Among them a contested presidential election result (2000), a terrorist attack on U.S. soil (2001), the beginning of a war in Iraq (2003), economic calamity (2008), the election and reelection of the nation s first African American president (2008, 2012), two changes in party control of the presidency, three changes in party control of the House (including the first Republican majority in 40 years as a result of the 1994 congressional elections), and five changes in party control of the Senate. Throughout these volatile times, one theme stands out: political polarization has characterized American politics, creating gridlock in Washington and breeding distrust of government among the nation s citizens. Evidence of polarization abounds. The Pew Research Center found substantial overlap in Congress between liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats in the 1970s. Those days are gone. By the 2011-2012 congressional term, the common ground had melted away the most liberal Republican was more conservative than the most conservative Democrat. Moreover, the partisan divide reflects polarization throughout the country. A 2014 poll of 10,000 adults found that Republicans and Democrats are further apart ideologically than at any point in recent history. The harm to our politics can be measured in the negative attitudes Americans hold about our governing institutions. In early 2015, more people disapproved (51.5 percent) of President Obama s performance than approved (44.0 percent). The news was worse for Congress. More than 72 percent of those polled disapproved of the job Congress was doing. Taken together, the presidential and congressional job ratings help explain why 60 percent believed the country was on the wrong track. Few first-hand accounts from those who witnessed and participated in these events currently exist. Their experiences and evaluations of trends and events, however, not only help us understand the dynamics and impact of partisanship over two decades but also suggest possible remedies. This book provides a personal perspective from one of a very few individuals who served both in Congress and in a presidential Cabinet during these tumultuous times. LaHood s account covers his 14 years in Congress with 10 chapters centered on four pivotal events. The first relates to the Gingrich Revolution when Republicans seized control of the House in 1995. As a former staffer to House Republican leader Robert H. Michel, LaHood occupied a unique vantage point as his party won and eventually lost their majority amidst the intrigue of intraparty leadership battles and increasing confrontation between the two political parties. The second series of events deals directly with the decline of civility in the House which accompanied the rise in acrimonious partisanship. LaHood organized and led four House retreats in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to understand the causes of, and remedies for, the increasingly dysfunctional conduct of the House s business. The lessons learned then about the prospects for promoting change in the culture of Congress remain current. The third defining episode: LaHood presided during House debate over President Bill Clinton s impeachment in 1998. His story also includes details on the collapse of the House Republican leadership in that period. The fourth event relates to Congress s investigation of 9/11 during which LaHood sat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. As the only elected Republican selected for President Obama s Cabinet, LaHood sought to bridge the partisan divide between the new Democratic administration and Republicans on Capitol Hill. It proved to be a struggle compounded by the president s governing style and Republican intransigence. President Obama s promise to govern in a bipartisan manner went unrealized, in spite of his attempts, for reasons LaHood addresses in this book. The book includes reproductions of White House photographs and archival materials.

The prevailing view is that existentialism is a product of post World War II Europe and had no significant presence in the United States before the 1940s. Jean-Paul Sartre and associates are credited with establishing the philosophy in France, and later introducing it to Americans. But conventional wisdom about existentialism in the United States is mistaken. The United States actually developed its own unique brand of existentialism several years before Sartre and company published their first existentialist works. Film noir, and the hard-boiled fiction that served as its initial source material, represent one form of American existentialism that was produced independently of European philosophy. Hard-boiled fiction introduced the tough and savvy private detective, the duplicitous femme-fatale, the innocent victim of circumstance, and the confessing but remorseless murderer. Creators of this uniquely American crime genre engaged existential themes of isolation, anxiety, futility, and death in the thrilling context of the urban crime thriller. The film noir cycle of Hollywood cinema brought these features to the screen, and offered a distinctively dark visual style compatible with the unorthodox narrative techniques of hard-boiled fiction writers. Film noir has gained critical acceptance for its artistic merit, and the term has a ubiquitous presence in American culture. Americans have much to gain by recognizing their own contributors to the history of existentialism. Existentialism, Film Noir, and Hard-Boiled Fiction describes and celebrates a unique form of existentialism produced mostly by and for working-class people. Faison s analysis of the existentialist value of early twentieth-century crime stories and films illustrates that philosophical ideas are available from a rich diversity of sources. Faison examines the plight of philosophy, which occupies a small corner of the academy, and is largely ignored beyond its walls. According to the author, philosophers do themselves and the public a disservice when they restrict what is called existentialism, or philosophy, to that which the academy traditionally approves. The tendency to limit the range of sanctioned material led the professional community to miss the philosophical importance of the critically acclaimed phenomenon known as film noir, and significantly contributes to the contemporary status of philosophy. Existentialism, Film Noir, and Hard-Boiled Fiction properly identifies existentialism, not as the original creation of post World War II Europeans, but as a shorthand term used to describe a compelling vision of the world. The themes associated with existentialism are found in the ancient Greek tragedies, and dramatic narrative has been the preferred conveyance of the existentialist message. American and European philosophers present during the early decades of the twentieth century, agreed that the United States was not fertile soil for the existentialist message, but the popularity of hard-boiled fiction and film noir contradicts such claims. Faison examines and emphasizes the working-class origins and orientation of hard-boiled fiction to reveal the division between elites and working-class Americans that led to the ill-informed conclusion. Faison effectively challenges the frequent assertion that the intellectual and creative sources of film noir are to be found in European thinkers and movements, and establishes film noir, like hard-boiled fiction, as a uniquely American phenomenon. Existentialism, Film Noir, and Hard-Boiled Fiction is scholarly and accessible, and will appeal to academics interested in existentialism, philosophy, and interdisciplinary studies, film enthusiasts interested in the narrative and visual techniques employed in film noir, and fans of hard-boiled mystery fiction and the work of screen legends of the Hollywood studio era.

Psychotherapist and educator of counsellors, Avraham Cohen is noted for his whole-person and deeply democratic-community approach to classroom pedagogy. His academic and pedagogical expertise and innovation have been valorized by the British Columbia Association of Clinical Counsellors that awarded him the 2007 2008 President s Award for Contribution to the Discipline. This award is given for distinguished contributions to the discipline of counselling through exemplary academic efforts. Cohen also received the Canadian Counselling Association 2008 Professional Article of the Year Award for his co-authored article, Suffering Loves and Needs Company: Daoist and Buddist Perspectives on the Counsellor as Companion. This book evolved from Avraham Cohen s doctoral dissertation, for which he received the 2006-2007 Ted Aoki Prize for the Outstanding Dissertation in Curriculum Studies from the University of British Columbia. Cohen, who has an extensive background as a humanistic-existential therapist and as a mindfulness meditator, believes that these two fields have much to offer in the field of education. His work in this book supplies a rich resource and shows that indeed the practice and philosophy of mindfulness and humanistic-existential practices is a gold mine waiting to be fully mined and applied in education. These ideas and practices come alive in his writings. This collection of provocative and evocative essays written for both educational theorists and classroom practitioners addresses very directly the much neglected human dimension and community development potential within classrooms. His groundbreaking work describes what most of us know intuitively to be important in classrooms, and which is rarely adequately addressed how to be authentically and fully human, and how this pedagogy of being human is central to becoming a great educator. He points towards the practical implementation of pedagogic practices that integrate the personal inner work of the educator, classroom practice, and curriculum learning. The philosophical underpinnings of his work are derived from Eastern and humanistic-existential philosophies. The combination of Eastern perennial Wisdom traditions and Western dynamism of individual existential freedom and developmental understanding is a formidable alliance for educational theory and practice. An interdisciplinary scholar, Cohen seamlessly weaves together his deep and fluent knowledge of the philosophy and practices of humanistic and holistic education, humanistic-existential psychotherapy, and Daoism and Zen. Cohen s classrooms are full of the heat of human interaction and connection along with the illuminating light of inner and personal reflection generated by the intense engagement amongst all the participants with their inner worlds and with each other, with personal inner work, and with curriculum material. His writing style has an immediacy that is hard to resist and the reader will feel themselves as in the experience. His students have described their experience as life changing. In the present volume, Cohen brings to life how such creative learning experience can unfold. For educators, this work provides a doorway into themselves, into their students, and into the integration of the personal, interpersonal, curriculum, the larger community, and the cosmos within which we all exist. Cohen writes, In my many years of work as a psychotherapist where I see and feel the open psychic wounds of those who seek refuge in my office, I have had the realization that the educational system has contributed significantly, even decisively, to the wounding experience of my clients. My clients speak of alienation, feelings of despair, and loneliness. My students and colleagues also speak of these experiences. My work as an educator of counselling students has been to look into the processes and structures that have contributed to these wounds and to provide an alternative and generative experience in an educational environment. Cohen s writings address these issues in a profound, clear, engaging, and wise way. This is an important book for those in education.

This book answers two related questions concerning civil war peace agreements. First, it explains why some peace agreements get signed while others do not get signed, and second, why do some of those agreements that get signed not hold to ultimately bring an end to protracted civil wars. In spite of the fact that most mediated settlements of civil wars are not durable, it is still important that we understand why some civil war agreements reach initial steps towards settlement, without which full and durable end of conflict is not possible. To improve our understanding of the process through which civil war agreements are concluded and why some settlements hold while others do not, this study looks at empirical evidence from three mediated sets of peace agreements. The focus is first a series of fourteen agreements that finally ended the first civil war in Liberia in 1997; second, the 1993 Arusha peace accord that failed to prevent the escalation of conflict into genocide in Rwanda; and third, a series of three agreements that were signed but did not initially hold to end the conflict in Sierra Leone. An excellent and thorough study, this book will be a welcome reference for collections in African studies, international peace studies, and political science.

This book is the successful outcome of a difficult feat it represents an interesting new approach to a well-trodden field of study. In this collection of essays, the author revisits certain issues within the distinctive frames of each essay. Of particular interest is the way the author is continually mindful of how postcolonial studies might be reconceptualised an approach that many critics of note have taken in recent years, especially Neil Lazarus, Reed Dasenbrock, and Bart Moore-Gilbert, in different ways. This author s way is, in part, to reconsider postcolonial literary history against ideas of History as a dominant epistemology. Another refreshing take here too is the way in which the theoretical positions are meaningfully explored in the context of imaginative literary texts; the book brings together the best scholarly qualities of close reading and a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of theory and the history that cloaks everything. This book is a very significant contribution to postcolonial studies and advances the ever more richly complicated discourse that has emerged in the field.

Brian Castro is one of the most innovative and challenging novelists writing in English today. By virtue of his childhood migration from Hong Kong to Australia, he is an Australian writer, but he writes from the margins of what might be termed mainstream Australian literature. In an Australian context, Castro has been linked with Patrick White because like White he is an intellectual, deeply ironic, modernist writer. His writing can also be comfortably situated within a wider circle of (largely European) modernist works by Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Gustav Flaubert, Vladimir Nabokov, W. G. Sebald, and the list goes on. Castro s writing conducts richly intertextual conversations with these writers and their work. Castro s writing is linguistically and structurally adventurous. He revels in the ability of good experimental writing to open up imaginative possibilities for the reader. He strives always to encourage his reader s imagination to embrace heterogeneity and uncertainty. His extensive engagement with the great modernist writers of the 20th century, combined with his Australian-Chinese cross-cultural concerns make his work unique amongst Australian writers. Castro s fiction is becoming increasingly recognized for its brilliance around the world. Readers and scholars, particularly from France, Germany and China, are discovering the delightful challenges and rewards his writing offers. In Australia, however, Castro s writing has often been dismissed by academics and major publishing houses as being too cerebral or too literary. He has been labeled a writers writer because of the literariness of his concerns and the vast sweep of intertextual references that inform his narratives. Castro s writing demands a committed, intelligent and passionate reader. He constructs narratives of absences, gaps, and multiple perspectives in the expectation that his reader will make the necessary imaginative connections and, in a sense, become the writer of his text. Castro has stated that the kind of novel he most enjoys reading is one he does not understand immediately, one that requires him to search out references and make discoveries. This is the kind of novel he writes. Perhaps, for this reason he has not attracted the large readership his work deserves. This study of Castro s fiction has two major objectives: to open up multiple points of entry into Castro s texts as a means of encouraging readers to make their own imaginative connections and to explore diverse ways of reading, as well as to initiate further published scholarly discussions and readings of Castro s work. In this first critical study of Brian Castro s work, Bernadette Brennan offers original and creative readings of Castro s eight published novels. Brennan guides the reader through Castro s elaborate semantics and at times dizzying language games to elucidate clearly Castro s imaginative concerns and strategies. She opens up the many rhizomatic connections between Castro s work and the multitude of texts and theorists that influence it and with whom it converses. And through all of this, she stays true to Castro s imaginative project: to remain always open ended, always gesturing towards possibility rather than certainty and closure. Brian Castro s Fiction is an important book for all literature and Australasian collections throughout the world.

Hailed as one of the most powerful and moving poets of his generation, Galway Kinnell has been commended by critics who often pair his name with such famous predecessors as Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Frost, W. B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, and Theodore Roethke. Born on February 1, 1927, Galway Kinnell has been working on the strength and truthfulness of his voice for almost five decades now. This well-written work offers a very important perspective on a major living poet, focusing specifically on what is a key theme in Kinnell s work and death. The author s thematic analysis does not stop short with a direct reading of the poetry, it also seeks to place her subject within several contexts, including that problematic pivotal position between Modernism and Postmodernism, and a specific poetic tradition (including T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Whitman and Dickinson). What emerges from the readings of Kinnell s various poetry collections is essentially an extended philosophical meditation on death, that both offers itself as a commentary whilst also repeatedly showing, with much clarity, how complex a subject death is for Kinnell. This meditation on death also means a deep consideration of those other large themes that have asserted themselves in American poetry, transcendentalism, nature, and life itself magnified against the darkness of death in the poet s work. This volume will make an important contribution to research on Kinnell and the author s ability to follow her subject into a very complex labyrinth of philosophical and aesthetic discussions, while always being mindful that Kinnell remains central, offers much in the way of a good example of literary analysis and scholarship. This book makes a significant contribution to scholarship on Galway Kinnell, a major contemporary poet whose work will receive more and more attention over the coming years. In addition, this work also marks a contribution to scholarship on poetry, American literature and contemporary literature, as well as to the fascination with death as a theme in much of American literature, from Dickinson and Poe to Plath and Salinger. Death in the Works of Galway Kinnell will be a very valuable resource for students and teachers of contemporary poetry and American literature.

Many scholars, in the U.S. and elsewhere, have decried the racism and Orientalism that characterizes much Western writing on the Middle East. Such writings conflate different peoples and nations, and movements within such peoples and nations, into unitary and malevolent hordes, uncivilized reservoirs of danger, while ignoring or downplaying analogous tendencies towards conformity or barbarism in other regions, including the West. Assyrians in particular suffer from Old Testament and pop culture references to their barbarity and cruelty, which ignore or downplay massacres or torture by the Judeans, Greeks, and Romans who are celebrated by history as ancestors of the West. This work, through its rich depictions of tribal and religious diversity within Mesopotamia, may help serve as a corrective to this tendency of contemporary writing on the Middle East and the Assyrians in particular. Furthermore, Aboona s work also steps away from the age-old oversimplified rubric of an Arab Muslim Middle East, and into the cultural mosaic that is more representative of the region. In this book, author Hirmis Aboona presents compelling research from numerous primary sources in English, Arabic, and Syriac on the ancient origins, modern struggles, and distinctive culture of the Assyrian tribes living in northern Mesopotamia, from the plains of Nineveh north and east to southeastern Anatolia and the Lake Urmia region. Among other findings, this book debunks the tendency of modern scholars to question the continuity of the Assyrian identity to the modern day by confirming that the Assyrians of northern Mesopotamia told some of the earliest English and American visitors to the region that they descended from the ancient Assyrians and that their churches and identity predated the Arab conquest. It details how the Assyrian tribes of the mountain dioceses of the Nestorian Church of the East maintained a surprising degree of independence until the Ottoman governor of Mosul authorized Kurdish militia to attack and subjugate or evict them. Assyrians, Kurds, and Ottomans is a work that will be of great interest and use to scholars of history, Middle Eastern studies, international relations, and anthropology.

About the series: Technology builders, entrepreneurs, consultants, academicians, and futurists from around the world share their wisdom in The Future of the Internet surveys conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project and Elon University. The series of surveys garners smart, detailed assessments of multi-layered issues from a variety of voices, ranging from the scientists and engineers who created the first Internet architecture a decade ago to social commentators to technology leaders in corporations, media, government, and higher education. Among the respondents are people affiliated with many of the world's top organizations, including IBM, AOL, Microsoft, Intel, ICANN, the Internet Society, Google, W3C, Internet2, and Oracle; Harvard, MIT, and Yale; and the Federal Communications Commission, FBI, U.S. Census Bureau, Social Security Administration, and U.S. Department of State. They provide significant and telling responses to questions about the future of government, education, media, entertainment, commerce, and more. They foresee continuing conflicts over control of networked communications and the content produced and shared online. They also predict the major changes ahead for everyone in every field of endeavor. Hopes and Fears: The Future of the Internet, Volume 2 The 2006 Future of the Internet II survey asked its participants to react to variety of networked information technology scenarios related to national boundaries, human languages, artificial intelligence and other topics. Among the questions implicit in the scenarios were: Will more people choose to live "e;off the grid"e;? Will autonomous machines leave people out of the loop? Will English be the lingua franca? Will national boundaries be displaced by new groupings? Among the themes in the predictions: Continued serious erosion of individual privacy; the improvement of virtual reality and rising problems tied to it; greater economic opportunities in developing nations; changes in languages; the rise of autonomous machines that operate beyond human control.

This book is largely about second language learning and identity construction. It is based on a unique hybrid design of case study and autoethnography. In addition, the diary study employed plays an important role in allowing the participants in the study to express themselves in a self-reflective way. The author examines and discusses with the participants of her research the everyday struggles of Japanese women in Canada who are trying to learn English. Of particular interest to this study was the role of metaphor in language which constructs our conceptual framework in a manner consistent with sociocultural theory and critical theory. Also, Foucault s discourse theory plays a prominent role, particularly with regard to diaries, interviews, and group meetings, in that it sees identity and discourse as being profoundly interrelated and inseparable. Thus, by examining discourse, one can become more aware of changes in identity. With regard to the context of this study in relation to other research, the author believes that there is a significant connection to Bonny Norton s notion of investment rather than motivation with regard to how invested a second language learner feels in his or her studies. Also, Hongyu Wang, who writes extensively in the style of autoethnography, helped the author understand her journey that generated feelings of exclusion, repression, and alienation. Bakhtin s notion of multiple voices was also very important to the author as she discussed identity as constantly shifting, layered voices in multiple contexts. In second language learning research, there is very little attention paid to the perspective of the learner with regard to his or her feelings and identity. Most other research in this area looks at particular linguistic functions such as syntax, morphology, and so forth. This research is also a documentation of the author s personal journey as she was a participant in her own research. Additionally, the importance of narratives is something that the author found was largely ignored in second language research. For this reason, the author ensured that it was central to her work. When the author first began this research, her aim was to help Japanese women who were studying English understand the changes in identity that they were experiencing. However, as her research progressed, she saw that this research would benefit all students pursuing a second language, all teachers of second languages, as well as researchers in SLA and curriculum theorists. The use of haiku throughout the book is a particularly unique reflection of poetic discourse. Autoethnography has also recently grown in popularity in terms of its use in research, and it is used extensively throughout this work. The use of the liminal space, doubling space, in-between space, Third Space notion in the exploration of identity and its transformation in this work is also quite interesting. Through this research, the author has uncovered a profound connection between language and identity. For Japanese women, learning English is both liberating and unsettling. This beautifully written work will be an important book for all involved in second language learning, including curriculum theorists as well as researchers concerned with connections between language and identity, poetic inquiry and discourse, narrative theory, and autoethnography.

Teaching Spectatorship: Essays and Poems on Audience in Performance offers a curriculum theory for audience in performance presented in a series of essays and poems on this key yet neglected educational topic. In a contemporary world that has been described as the society of the spectacle and the performative society, it becomes a significant task for educators to find ways to assist students in becoming more active and critical spectators. This unique book is presented in seven chapters that survey how audience has been taken up (or ignored) across many disciplines, including aesthetic philosophy, performance theory, cultural studies, and arts education. Drawing on key findings discovered in this extensive literature review, the author goes on to present a number of chapters that theorize how spectatorship may become a central concern of curriculum through committed and teacher-facilitated attendance of live performance. These performance experiences which may be community-based or professional then serve as catalysts for creative postperformance interactions with artists and further classroom explorations. Throughout the text, the author makes use of an emergent arts-based methodology called poetic inquiry. The poems she creates offer readers other perspectives on the investigation and act as a reminder that cultural performance, like poetry, is an aesthetic event that calls us to attention, to wide-awakeness in the world. Teaching Spectatorship is a groundbreaking study that makes a critical contribution to the fields of performance studies, curriculum theory, and drama/theatre education.

Usually recognised as the first professional woman writer, Aphra Behn (1640 1689) has become a popular subject for academic study. Most scholars have concentrated on her poetry, her short stories, and her one full-length novel, finding fuel for arguments that suggest she was an early feminist or a proponent of anti-racism. Although there have been examinations of individual plays, the prefaces and epistles, as well as studies, none examine her plays against aspects of the cultural context of the time and the political background, which have usually been used as examples supporting a particular argument, in relation to certain events of the time. No one has considered her simply as a dramatist, or as one of the most prolific and popular amongst her contemporaries working in the theatre at a particular time in theatrical history, nor has anyone discussed how her plays reflect and use the changing staging methods to convey their themes. Moreover, because of her comparatively enormous output and her exceptionally detailed stage directions, Behn can be considered as an exemplar of the changes that occurred in the ways of staging on the Restoration stage. This is not something which has been done before. The study considers the ways in which Behn has constructed her plays and used their staging to ensure the perceptions and apprehensions she wants from that audience. It considers the ways in which her use of the scenic stage developed from contemporary staging, acting styles, and changing stage conventions and how she used these to contribute to the reception and understanding of her plays by the audience. This book thus considers the theatrical impact on the audience in the use of painted settings, discoveries and disclosure, disguises and dark scenes. The audience s reactions to events on stage are as much part of the theatrical experience as the dialogue and actions of the players, and are based on their implicit understanding of the relationship of their own life experiences to those shown on stage. And in almost all her plays Aphra Behn was showing the restoration audience their own lives and behaviour writ large. This is an important book for those in theatre, literature, and women s studies.

In this groundbreaking book, the author advocates that many relational collapses are the result of ineptitude rather than ill will. That is, they are the result of a lack of skills rather than a lack of goodwill. As this book puts it, many of society s relational problems may be competency related. This might be good news since competencies can be learned. The purpose of this book is to take a careful look at how such competencies can be developed. Beginning with the view that if such competencies can be learned, they must first be defined and have standards set for them, it asks the question, Can competency standards be designed for soft skills? It is argued that the answer is yes. Locating itself in the workplace context (where adults often spend most of their lives), but relevant to life in general, this book shows how theoretically sound competency standards can be developed for selected soft skills. This is done by adapting a methodology used to specify workplace competency standards. The book also notes a number of practical and ideological issues that must be considered at implementation. This book shows how standards for three such skills have been developed and provided with a preliminary workplace validation. The skills selected are related to interpersonal skills and are derived from the framework of emotional intelligence competencies popularised by Goleman. This is an important book for those in business studies.

Up for Grabs: The Future of the Internet, Volume 1 is the first volume of an exciting series by the Pew Internet &American Life Project and Elon University. How will the Internet be expected to change the workplace, family life, education and many other foundations of society between 2004 and 2014? Significantly. That was the forecast of nearly 1,300 leading technology experts and scholars who responded to The Future of the Internet I, a 2004 survey by researchers at the Pew Internet &American Life Project and Elon University. The extensive elaborations supplied by survey respondents provide a vision of a networked, digital future that enhances many peoples' lives but also has some distressing implications. The big-picture Internet issues of the next decade, as foreseen by the experts in this survey, include: positive and negative changes in the family dynamic; a conflict between our desire for privacy, security and ownership of intellectual property and our desire for the convenience of free information sharing on networked devices; and a concern over being inundated with information. About the series: Technology builders, entrepreneurs, consultants, academicians, and futurists from around the world share their wisdom in The Future of the Internet surveys conducted by the Pew Internet &American Life Project and Elon University. The series of surveys garners smart, detailed assessments of multi-layered issues from a variety of voices, ranging from the scientists and engineers who created the first Internet architecture a decade ago to social commentators to technology leaders in corporations, media, government, and higher education. Among the respondents are people affiliated with many of the world's top organizations, including IBM, AOL, Microsoft, Intel, ICANN, the Internet Society, Google, W3C, Internet2, and Oracle; Harvard, MIT, and Yale; and the Federal Communications Commission, FBI, U.S. Census Bureau, Social Security Administration, and U.S. Department of State. They provide significant and telling responses to questions about the future of government, education, media, entertainment, commerce, and more. They foresee continuing conflicts over control of networked communications and the content produced and shared online. They also predict the major changes ahead for everyone in every field of endeavor.

Conventional literary representations of Western American history repress the violent conquest central to U.S. westward expansion through images of open space, autonomous individualism, and masculine heroism. In particular, the genre of autobiography has traditionally reproduced autonomous, transcendent, and masculinist notions of selfhood. This book analyzes New Western autobiographical narratives that contest such colonial understandings of race, gender, and landscape. Through a comparative analysis of memoirs and multiform narratives by diverse Euro-American, Native American, and Chicana writers, this study explores the ways in which New Western writing both reproduces and transforms conventional representations of the American West. Through the lens of narrative form, this book closely analyzes contemporary texts that express contradictory historical visions and notions of selfhood, even as they push the boundaries of autobiography. The book s introduction provides a theoretical and historical overview of Western American historiography and literary representations. The book is then divided into four chapters, three of which compare contradictory visions of Western identity in texts by diverse Euro-American and Native American authors from the late twentieth century. The fourth chapter focuses on these issues in the work of a popular Chicana author. Drawing upon a wide array of methodologies and perspectives, Narrating the American West offers valuable insights to students and scholars in a variety of fields, including postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, the New Western History, Native American Studies, American Studies, gender studies, and autobiography theory.

This book is, above all, a highly informed guide to students and readers of literature, for whom the world of literary study has become a maze of theoretical hurdles. The intention is to equip readers with the necessary skills to restore vitality to the act of reading literary texts, crucially, in the moment of engagement with text. Beyond this central aim lies the attendant wish to restore the study of literature to the centre of civil life within modern society. This book makes an enormous and timely contribution to the study of literature in the context of the major debates surrounding literary studies in recent decades without reducing the primary literary texts to footnotes during the act of reading. Chapters include an appraisal of intention, and translation, interpreting poetry, and the relation between literature and philosophy, always framed against a rich tapestry of literary texts drawn from many cultures and periods. Reading Literature After Deconstruction will be an extremely valuable resource for students and scholars of literature, literary theory, and theories of reading.

Web sites have emerged as a massively popular and important tool in public relations, marketing, organizational communication, political campaigns, and a host of other fields. However, only a tiny percentage of Web site research reflects the latest thinking in research and practice. The result of using these old approaches has been that research on homepages has been largely unable to address the most central question in all modern marketing and public relations research and practice: How can organizations can build and maintain relationships with their publics/customers? This relational focus has characterized marketing research and practice since at least the early 1980s and public relations since the late 1980s, yet Web page design and use has, on the whole, failed to adopt it. Web Site Public Relations steps in to fill this void and help move Web site research and use toward a more professional and theoretic foundation. This book is an original and rigorous attempt to build a model of the experience of visiting Web sites that places the visitor rather than the sponsor or Web page at the center of the experience. Although it is one of the first such attempts, this book s rigor, theoretic foundation, and genuine insightfulness suggest that it will stand the test of time and may well become one of the most influential works in visitor-centered research on Web sites and the Internet. As such, the findings reported here will be of interest to those who use the Internet, whether for personal or commercial purposes; as well as those seeking to study the social and behavioral effects of the Internet, including those seeking to study its effects on children and adolescents. This study focuses attention on the cognitions, attitudes, and behaviors visitors exhibit while visiting Web sites. The advent of what has come to be called Web 2.0 makes this book even more important than it would have been when older Web technologies dominated because Web 2.0 includes such things as user-powered content sites, and the like. A way to understand how visitors experience such Web sites is critical to learning how to harness their new potential. Web Site Public Relations will be an invaluable reference for those in the field of communication, public relations, and marketing.

Prevailing interpretation in international political economy following the work of such analysts as Easterly and Alesina, is that ethnic and linguistic diversity is harmful to economic development because it is a source of division and even destructive political conflict. This study takes a very different view. It argues that ethnic and linguistic diversity is a source of creativity and productivity in society and therefore is an indispensable component of economic development. Based on an examination of advanced-industrial (OECD) countries, this is the first study to show at the macro-level across countries that ethnic and linguistic diversity is a positive source of creativity for society. Extensive econometric analysis backs up the empirical findings of the study. This work promises to steer international political economy in a new direction. It will highlight the positive contributions to entrepreneurship, technological innovation, and economic growth in the modern society of the Information Age. An important qualification of the findings is that the study shows how important government support is for research and development. Without this support much of the creativity in society in terms of skill and manpower gets lost or wasted. This book is original and groundbreaking. It adds a new dimension to the fields of international political economy and international political finance.

The twentieth century saw profound demographic changes, generating considerable anxiety about the well being of the child and the future of the family. The movement to ban corporal punishment provides a compelling example of how such anxiety is manifested in discussions of childrearing. Debates around child discipline speak directly to the burning question, Who exactly is in charge of families today? By and large, the common expert consensus is that corporal punishment is considered to be a symptom of dysfunctional parenting, yet corporal punishment is almost universal in American families, and especially prevalent in low-income and/or African American families. Single mothers in particular are believed to be at high risk for harsh parenting, but family structure itself is closely tied to race and class. Most research regarding corporal punishment has relied heavily on white, middle-class samples, and very few studies have looked specifically at the relationship between family structure and corporal punishment. The study reported here is unique in that it offers and tests a conceptual model for predicting corporal punishment by family structure using a large sample of low-income, predominantly African American families and advanced analytical method. Study findings contradict commonly held beliefs regarding single mothers propensity toward corporal punishment, as well as the reflexive equation of corporal punishment with harsh parenting. Mothers in this study were most likely to use (low level) corporal punishment when living with the biological father or in a multi-generational family. Likewise, maternal warmth was associated with (low level) corporal punishment. Mothers living with surrogate fathers were more likely to report higher, potentially problematic levels of physical punishment, consistent with research showing an elevated risk of child maltreatment in reconstituted families. This study demonstrates that family structure interacts in complex ways with race and class to influence parenting. Research that relies on main effects models of family structure and Eurocentric notions of family is likely to yield misleading findings and may indeed result in the denigration of legitimate cultural differences in parenting. Corporal Punishment and Low-Income Mothers is an essential, groundbreaking study with important implications for those in sociology and social work.

The Internet creates a very unique environment where numerous individuals and widely distributed organizations can communicate and even collaborate for common interests. Virtual communities, shared information databases, and online forums are visible examples of the self-organizing social collectivities, which emerge from the many-to-many interactions among voluntary participants. Online social communities exemplified by blogs and social networking sites are getting more and more attention nowadays from the business sector, and companies are eager to find ways to use them for business opportunities. Despite the mushrooming hype regarding the unlimited potentials of virtual community, little is known about its complex nature how virtual communities are born, sustained, and under what circumstances they collapse. A virtual community is an aggregate of voluntary participants, in which individual behaviors are in conjunction with the behaviors of others. People decide to contribute or free-ride in response to the contributing or free-riding behaviors of others. If many people already are contributing to the community, for example, one may be strongly tempted to free-ride, while this may not be the case if there are very few contributors. Understanding this social interdependence is the key to grasping the collective dynamics underlying virtual communities. This book illuminates the implications of the collective social dynamics in a computer-mediated environment on advertising, business, and communication in general. Along with conceptual discussions, this book shows some experimental findings related to the psychological and social-structural factors affecting individuals communicative motivations.

Disability and illness are not easy subjects to write about in a direct manner. These are, however, the domains that most of us will eventually inhabit. It is a simple fact that our bodies fail, though our culture protests this at every occasion. The bodies of disabled people have been deemed unworthy of textual representation beyond the texts of medicine. The life stories of those who are suffering are seen as tragic, fodder for stories of what happens to the other. The author posits that the sociopolitical structures of our culture limit the range of disabled people s positions in the world; their absence in books and other cultural products points to the absence of social equity. The subjective experience of illness, impairment, and disability is poorly reflected in most current models of health and disease used in the practices and policies of medical and health institutions. Those with illness, impairment, and disability see this deficiency as a serious problem. This type of work that is called into creation by its subjects exemplifies the notion that writers are ethically preoccupied with telling stories, not only for oneself, but also for others. This book defies and celebrates academic writing; it presents a story of illness and disability, experiences that collectively enrich and challenge our understandings of embodiment, narrative, social structures, identity, and politics the full continuum of what it means and has meant, to be human. The phenomenon of disability exists between and in people and social structures; as a category, disability is filled with multiple sites and meanings and resists reduction. It encompasses the visible and the invisible of bodily experiences and social systems along numerous and varied axes of difference. Conceptually, disability is a site of oppression, an axis of identity, and a call for human rights and social justice. Stories like these move through our bodies, culture, and politics. As readers and writers, we are increasingly interested in how we can tell stories, what stories are telling, and from whose perspective the story is being told. The importance of language to describe, to witness lives, cannot be underestimated. The inclusion of photographs of illness and disability are also noteworthy in this writing and mark its value. Artful texts represent our changed understanding of the world through our relationships with art and texts and ourselves, we perceive our sense-making as we create what has not previously existed. Conventional writing has been disciplined to inhabit particular kinds of space, a space of logic and the rational. This book allows us to meet with the intimate ephemerality of life through its allegiance to imagination. Its contribution lies also in its poeticizing of theory, the embodied manner of the writing, and its capacity as a text to reunite us with the life world. Writing toward a culture embodying principles of social justice occurs in many forms, and part of what this text does is draw us toward an aesthetics of awareness, a profoundly subversive, relational, and social position. Social justice is an embodied concept, lived on a daily basis, in the commonplace of our lives. Social justice is implicit in this text and the imagery, and may be represented through (although not exclusively) a scar, a tale of a body oppressed by a group embedded in a medical hierarchy, people who do not want us to know or to question their knowing. The goals of the book include the cultivation of imagination, empathy, compassion, and awareness in the reader/viewer. This is a remarkable and important book for both arts-informed researchers and educators and non-arts-informed researchers and educators in cultural studies, critical disability studies, education, health, and qualitative research.

About the series: Technology builders, entrepreneurs, consultants, academicians, and futurists from around the world share their wisdom in The Future of the Internet surveys conducted by the Pew Internet &American Life Project and Elon University. The series of surveys garners smart, detailed assessments of multilayered issues from a variety of voices, ranging from the scientists and engineers who created the first Internet architecture a decade ago to social commentators to technology leaders in corporations, media, government, and higher education. Among the respondents are people affiliated with many of the world s top organizations, including IBM, AOL, Microsoft, Intel, ICANN, the Internet Society, Google, W3C, Internet2, and Oracle; Harvard, MIT, and Yale; and the Federal Communications Commission, FBI, U.S. Census Bureau, Social Security Administration, and U.S. Department of State. They provide significant and telling responses to questions about the future of government, education, media, entertainment, commerce, and more. They foresee continuing conflicts over control of networked communications and the content produced and shared online. Ubiquity, Mobility, Security: The Future of the Internet, Volume 3: Based on the third canvassing of Internet specialists and analysts by the Pew Internet &American Life Project, this volume showcases the responses of technology stakeholders and critics who were asked to assess scenarios about the future social, political, and economic impact of the Internet. Some 578 leading Internet activists, builders, and commentators responded in this survey to scenarios about the effect of the Internet on social, political, and economic life in the year 2020. An additional 618 stakeholders also participated in the study, for a total of 1,196 participants who shared their views. The insights garnered in the study included predictions made on the role and importance of mobile devices, the transparency of people and organizations, talk and touch user interfaces with the Internet, the challenges of sharing content while trying to perfect intellectual property law and copyright protection, divisions between work and personal time given the blurring of physical and virtual reality, and the next-generation engineering of the network to improve the current Internet structure.