Bøger udgivet af Lexington Books

In this book, Mark Ward Sr. draws on a combination of ethnographic, autoethnographic, and sociolinguistic research to identify and analyze white evangelicals' distinctive speech code from a perspective rooted deeply in both communication studies and the evangelical community. Ward posits that the Bible, positioned as the one dominant symbol that unifies all meaning, leads to the widespread adoption of the language of literalism driving evangelical identity, patriarchy, anti-intellectualism, authoritarianism, and Christian nationalism. This, he argues, divides the world into a cosmic war between secular humanism and an all-encompassing "biblical worldview." Ward's positionality as both an ethnographer of religious communication who has observed white evangelical culture for two decades and also as a self-identified evangelical for four decades makes him uniquely qualified to casting an insider's critical yet balanced eye on conservative white Christian culture. This book will complement existing scholarship within anthropology and sociology-where evangelicalism has been studied in conjunction with the rise of the Religious Right-and will contribute unique insights from the religious communication subdiscipline.

New Democratic Initiatives in Authoritarian Twenty-First Century Latin America uses a multidisciplinary approach to understand the coincidence of emerging social movements, seeking more meaningful forms of democratic participation, on the one hand, and the rise of new authoritarian politics that in part rely on chaos and disorder as mechanisms of domination, on the other. This edited collection argues that Latin America has entered a new phase of political and economic volatility in which traditional conceptual divisions between democracy and authoritarianism need to be re-thought. How are democratic movements coping with and reacting to the new right-wing politics of Jair Bolsonaro and Javier Milei, which among other things, attempt to incorporate the popular classes? Does the "second pink tide" offer meaningful avenues for popular empowerment? How are counter hegemonic struggles built? What are the challenges and opportunities faced by women, queer and trans people, cultural workers, people with disabilities and indigenous groups in this conjuncture? These are the key questions addressed in this book.

Political Process: New Perspectives on the Virginia and Bloomington Schools explores political process as emphasized by the Virginia and Bloomington schools of political economy. Though the Virginia school of public choice and Bloomington school of institutional analysis have risen to prominence through the works of James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and Elinor Ostrom; their joint emphasis on political process has been neglected. The chapters in this volume explore the idea of political process through a multi-disciplinary perspective and to better situate both schools in this discussion. Approximately half the chapters make theoretical contributions, proposing new frameworks for understanding how people come together to make collective decisions. The other half examine applied case studies through a process-oriented framework.

Through historical and current cultural abjection of the "animal" and the "bad queer," Queer and Animal Provocations: Homonormativity, Animal Exploitation, and Sexual Violence provides insight into the relationship between queer people and animals to show how homonormative aspirations of "good queers" can unwittingly further entrench animal abuse. To uncover this connection, this book travels through notions of queer citizenship, animal justice, colonial constructs of the human, and queer movements for liberation. Jessica Ison explores encounters between the discourse of queer liberation and animal abjection, through the use of advertisements, corporate sponsors, media articles, laws, activist movements, and lobbying efforts, to discover how the struggles for acceptable queer identity are entwined with entrenching animal exploitation. This book disentangles the exploitation of animals from queer liberation, arguing for scholars and activists to take action in future struggles through solidarity and mutual support within the abolition of cages and systems of injustice.

In Educator Perspectives of Self-Efficacy with Special Populations: From Administrators to Pre-Service Teachers, the authors argue for the importance of self-efficacy in all realms of education, starting with pre-service teachers, whose efficacy levels significantly impact their classroom confidence and effectiveness. Teachers who are confident in their ability to positively impact learning tend to implement evidence-based interventions, offer constructive feedback, and cultivate supportive classroom atmospheres. Administrators who foster inclusive practices, offer professional development, and nurture positive school cultures can enhance student success. In addition, when used effectively, technology empowers educators to tailor instruction, personalize learning, and support special populations, albeit with potential challenges. Likewise, skilled classroom management fueled by high self-efficacy, establishes clear expectations, fosters positive student relationships, and effectively addresses behavioral issues. In essence, self-efficacy serves as a cornerstone in educational dynamics, shaping attitudes, behaviors, and outcomes across stakeholders. By nurturing belief in their abilities and fortifying support structures, educators pave the way for inclusive and equitable learning environments.

Institutional Epistemology and Extreme Inequality: Knowledge and Governance in a Non-ideal World provides an account of the fundamental design of an institutional system that can reliably solve problems, learn, and attain knowledge. Reconciling non-ideal system-oriented epistemic democracy and liberalism, Marko-Luka Zub¿i¿ develops a unified theory of institutional epistemology. From Deweyan experimentalism and Hayekian epistemic institutionalism to open democracy and pluralist liberalism of New Diversity Theory, Zub¿i¿ integrates insights from pragmatism, studies of division of cognitive labor and collective search under complexity, governance studies, and critical social epistemology. Institutional Epistemology and Extreme Inequality also provides a new, decisive epistemological argument that protection against extreme economic inequalities is a condition of epistemic reliability of an institutional system. Thus, Zub¿i¿ shows that-along with constitutional liberties, self-governance, open markets, and polycentricity-freedom from poverty and limits on private wealth are the institutional devices we collectively and individually need to reliably solve difficult problems and attain knowledge.

Political Humour and Zimbabwean Identity on Social Media Platforms by Mbongeni Jonny Msimanga studies Zimbabwean digital political communication to investigate how political satire constructs, critiques, contests, mediates, and negotiates national identity. Focusing on Bustop and Magamba TV, two YouTube channels that specialise in satiric political skits, this book demonstrates what it means to be a Zimbabwean, and who or what authorises such belonging. Msimanga traces contestations of Zimbabwe's national identity since independence in 1980, refracted by the Gukurahundi genocide, questioning national sovereignty and national security, the fast-track land reform programme, and human rights abuses perpetrated by the incumbent ZANU-PF government. This book provides a conceptual framework that deploys a context-sensitive understanding of satire relevant to the global south and to Zimbabwe. Msimanga concludes that Magamba and Bustop TV are successful in utilising opportunities inherent in the inflection point and crossroads facing Zimbabwe to open and amplify new spaces for contesting, negotiating, and critiquing what it means to belong to the national project.

Reimagining Democracy: Communication Activism, Social Justice, and Prefiguration in Participatory Budgeting presents findings from a multi-year, community-based, critical ethnography of two participatory budgeting (PB) processes in Denver, Colorado. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and in-depth interviews with PB participants, Vincent Russell argues that the PB processes served as sites of prefigurative communication activism, where participants reimagined how government should operate, and activists transformed social and power relations through their in-group deliberations. Participants from oppressed populations emphasized forging relationships and feelings of solidarity among each other as they struggled for liberation, dignity, and social justice. Reimagining Democracy teaches important lessons about the state of democratic culture in the United States and offers alternative pathways for public decision making that hold the promise of restructuring practices, processes, and outcomes to be more socially just. Written in an engaging style with a focus on narratives about social change, this book is an important contribution for scholars, practitioners, and community members passionate about social justice activism.

In The Contemporary Fantastic: Reimagining Reality in French Fiction, Amanda Vredenburgh identifies a contemporary shift in the use of fantastic modalities in French fiction, no longer dominated by the desire to escape the disappointments of reality nor the reader's hesitation about the reality of the novel's events, but by its innovative confrontation with the real. What could bizarre, uncanny, or supernatural literary representations have to tell us about very urgent, real issues like the environmental crisis, racism, migration, and the formation of egalitarian communities? Through close readings of a selection of novels by Marie Darrieussecq, Marie NDiaye, and Antoine Volodine, Vredenburgh argues that the ability to blur boundaries gives the fantastic both an emancipatory and reparative function in its engagement with contemporary political issues. These authors complicate categories such as human/nonhuman, French/foreign, inclusion/exclusion, and individual/community and shift the focus to the experiential and affective dimensions of these issues, ultimately allowing us to better think and feel with those that are excluded. Vredenburgh concludes that this use of the fantastic has a specific ethical stance, which encourages a community-based approach founded on compassion and inclusion.

The Lives of Soviet Secret Agents: Religion and Police Surveillance in the USSR explores the covert world of secret police surveillance within the Soviet Union, delving into lesser-known grassroots religious life and the collusion of religious communities with the Soviet secret police. These case studies come from Ukraine, Latvia, Kazakhstan, and Russia, spanning from the Central Black-Earth region to the Bashkir and Udmurt regions. This book reconstructs the stories of insider agents, focusing on the entanglements and ambiguities of collaboration and secret police surveillance in the Soviet era. These are the stories of the resilience and creative agency of religious believers in times when their faith in God was considered a legal offense. These issues are addressed through an in-depth analysis of previously untapped archival sources from the Soviet secret police archives and eyewitness testimonies.

Korean Nuclear Diaspora: Redress Movements of Korean Atomic-bomb Victims in Japan comprehensively explores the history of Korean victims of the 1945 atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Following the bombings and Korea's liberation from Japanese colonial rule, these Korean atomic-bomb victims dispersed across Japan, South Korea, and North Korea, and have often been left without any relief or redress for decades. Focusing on those Korean victims living in Japan, the author thoroughly examines how they have struggled to achieve recognition and support. Based on intensive fieldwork, archival research, and interviews with key figures from the Korean redress movement, this book analyzes how their movements have been significantly affected and constrained by the Cold War, unresolved colonial relations between Korea and Japan, nationalistic tensions between North Korea, South Korea, and Japan, and the national division both in the Korean Peninsula and within the Korean community in Japan. Despite these difficulties, the redress movements of Korean nuclear victims in Japan were sustained by their unique ideal of national "unification" and joint efforts with Korean and Japanese citizens, the history of which can deconstruct the mainstream narratives of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Toxic nostalgia is not a new phenomenon, and instances of an undying past refusing to perish and plaguing the present, can be found throughout history. However, examined in Toxic Nostalgia on Screen, in the early years of the new millennium, it has acquired further meaning and not just applies to a dangerous longing for the past, but a way of being in the present world. Here in our modern time, undead memory is not just a remembrance of the past that is visited upon the present with negative implications, but the embodiment of monstrous imagined histories and ideologies that dictate the way we live today so that tomorrow is not the future, but a never-ending return to the past.

Defending the view that Karl Jaspers' concept of irrationality (Widervernunft) is better able to account for pathological patterns of individual and collective thinking, Karl Jaspers' Theory of Irrationality: From Delusions to Worldviews argues that irrationality is incorrigibility, a blockage of reason as the will to communication. Highlighting the importance of freedom and creativity at the heart of reason (Vernunft), Daniel Adsett analyzes examples of delusional thought through a Jaspersian lens. He shows that irrationality arises when we hold to certain attitudes with an incorrigible conviction and refuse to genuinely consider the possibility that we might need to revise or change our beliefs. In presenting these arguments, Adsett offers a novel contribution to contemporary debates about the character of reason while rehabilitating an often neglected aspect of Jaspers' thought.

Shifting Production to Southeast Asia: Electronics Transnational Corporations Moving to Vietnam since the 2000s explores how a labor-intensive industry has been expanded from the 'World Factory' - China to developing Southeast Asia under the changing dynamics in the global and regional production networks, including the recent COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical tension, by using the case study of the production relocations of the consumer electronics manufacturing industry to Vietnam. David Yuen Tung Chan and Chun Yang explore the changing trade and investment patterns as well as the transformations of the electronics production networks and the changing roles and functions of China, Vietnam and other Asian countries, the relocations of firms and the strategic coupling with Vietnam, as well as the impacts of the post-pandemic dynamics. The shifting electronics production from China to Vietnam, which increased since the mid-2000s, is not a simple expansion led by the conventional lead firms from the 'North' solely to cut costs, but it is a rather complicated and multiscale process that has been simultaneously driven by various tiers of firms and levels of governments from different origins out of various dynamics at different spatial scales.

Edited by Eric M. Bridges, Sheila Smith McKoy, and LaJuan Simpson-Wilkey, The Wisdom of Ifá: An Ancient Paradigm for the 21st Century and Beyond explores Yoruba spirituality and the complex ways in which the acknowledgement of Ifá as a wisdom source can be used to address the needs of humanity in the twenty-first century and beyond. Through rituals and practices that honor nature's rhythms, the contributors explore how Ifá guides us towards sustainable coexistence with our environment, recognizing that our well-being is intricately linked to the health of the planet. The contributors also show how, in the realm of environmental stewardship, Ifá offers a holistic worldview that recognizes the interconnectedness of all life forms. This book offers discussions on environmentalism, gender, and politics that connect across the bounds of time, through the history, mythology, and lived realities of the tradition. As an ancient wisdom tradition that has enriched West African cultures, Ifá offers a roadmap for modern civilization to charter new paths for humanity and the challenges that we face.

In this edited volume, contributors recognize and reflect on communication studies' queer past and examine the current state of queer theorizing within communication studies. Through this reflection, the book fills in gaps in the history of this sub-discipline and demonstrates that even as scholars in the field empowered queer voices in the past, they often failed to recognize the intersectional aspects of queer identity, through which scholars can form new understandings of past scholarship in new queer(er) lights. Ultimately, contributors collectively provide a critique for the lack of broader inclusion of queer theorization in the field and provide new pathways for the continued development of queer communication studies.

African Identity Today in the Writings of John Maxwell Coetzee and Ben Silver Okri is a comparative study of the writings of the South African author John Maxwell Coetzee and the Nigerian author Ben Silver Okri. It charts the thematic and technical presentation of cultural identity in the literary output of both authors, with special reference to their respective trilogies, namely: Coetzee's Scenes from Provincial Life and Okri's The Famished Road. Through examining these texts, the book explores the dilemmas faced by many contemporary authors while discussing issues related to the construction of cultural identity in a postcolonial world. Studying Coetzee's and Okri's texts from a postcolonial perspective reveals how their very different writings share a range of commonalities. Both authors seek to find a middle ground between colonised and colonising cultures as they attempt to deconstruct the stereotypical images of the Other, creating a world purified of racial influences.

Jewish Women Science Fiction Writers Create Future Females: Gender, Temporality-and Yentas, the fourth volume in Marleen S. Barr's Future Females critical feminist science fiction anthology series, is the first essay collection devoted to Jewish women science fiction writers. The anthology forges new alliances across disciplinary boundaries-feminist theory, science fiction, and Jewish Studies-by forming a scholarly force, consisting of established critical voices and cutting-edge, fresh perspectives. Acknowledging the growing cultural popularity of science fiction, Barr's goal is to showcase new vistas for exploring gender through Jewish women's science fiction visions. It is time for Jewish women science fiction writers to receive the focused critical examination they deserve.

This collection specifically and solely focuses on Young Adult literature texts where cancer plays a prominent role, including widely-read texts like John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, Nicholas Sparks' A Walk to Remember, and Jesse Andrews' Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. The chapters present a variety of arguments, each developing a novel investigation into how these stories explore the effects cancer has on a person, a family, or on a relationship. As scientific studies continue to devlop new understandings of the biology behind cancer, and new sociological studies continue to uncover how a cancer diagnosis impacts the fabric of our culture(s), these collected essays continue to investigate how authors have woven cancer into the stories we write for young people. A number of distinct avenues are taken here, arguing for new approaches in crafting narrative, deeper appreciation for family support networks (or their absence), and what literary criticism can uncover when applied to cancer narratives.

In Pedagogies of the Enfleshed: Critical Communication Pedagogy Otherwise, Lore LeMaster proffers a historic account of the rise of education and, in turn, communication studies as a distinct field of study. In doing so, the author reconsiders communication's disciplinary origins with less of an emphasis on the mythos of the Ancient Greeks and, more accurately, relocates them within the historic context of U.S. settler colonial development and ever-expanding empire. LeMaster argues that the point of critical communication pedagogy otherwise isn't to instill critical sensibilities into our teaching, but to instead draw on lived experiences as grounds for more effective uses of communication to intervene in oppressive relations across (in)formal pedagogical contexts and in service of liberatory change. Where critical communication pedagogy calls for reform, critical communication pedagogy otherwise labors in service of liberation within the long arc of revolutionary change, beginning from y/our vantage as educators-as-learners. This is especially crucial, LeMaster posits, in the face of critical ongoing issues, including economic recessions, growing climate collapse, escalating fascisms, amassing white nationalisms, and U.S.-funded genocides, all amid an active pandemic. Ultimately, this book makes a compelling case for the need of new critical communication pedagogy tools or, at minimum, approaches to communication pedagogy that support critical worldmaking efforts beyond recognition and with resource support at the local level.

Precarious Domesticity and the British Novel: Space, Gender, and Empire investigates the ways domesticity shapes and threatens female characters in British fiction from the 1750s to the 1850s. Going far beyond the well-trod ground of the marriage plot, women writers in this period explored complicated issues such as sexual abuse, grief, and the way coverture and inheritance laws challenged women's survival. The author argues that women writers used the novel as a space where they could confront anxieties about the precarity of domesticity and the implicit threat of homelessness many women of the middle ranks faced. Precarious Domesticity explores the way female characters subvert these dynamics by reordering domestic space to enact ingenious and creative resistances to their marginalization in Jane Collier, Sarah Scott, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charlotte Brontë. The author also explores the implications of British imperialism's impact on domestic ideology, both in the consumer products imported into England and the wealth derived from plantation slavery and global trade made possible by enslaved labor.

The conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity, occurring in the golden glint of the sunset of the Ancient World, was not a concluding chapter but an opening one. The sequential conversion of the barbarian tribal invaders of the Empire and the subsequent conversion of those beyond the old imperial limes was the making of European culture, a prototypical Christendom. The process has been well studied from the perspective of kings, popes, and missionaries by some of the finest historians of our era. But the missing component in this civilizational change is that of the decisive influence of barbarian queens, Christian women who led their royal husbands in the dangerous journey from one religion to another. In recent years, much has been done to illuminate queenship in general, but a study focusing specifically on the queen's role in conversion is lacking. This book seeks to remedy that and provide a missing piece in women's history.

Was Edward Sapir's perspective on culture and personality groundbreaking, or should we regard it as just one more theory that reached a scientific dead-end? Culture and Subjectivity: Exploring the Interplay of Edward Sapir`s Anthropology and Lacanian Psychoanalysis introduces a fresh perspective to traditional anthropological discourse by exploring Edward Sapir's insights into culture and personality relationship alongside Jacques Lacan's theories on the individual and collective. This book reassesses the dynamics between subjective and social realms, paving the way for potentially a new anthropological model of subjectivity and the definition of Culture. Exploring the historical context of anthropology-psychoanalysis relationships, this book synthesizes diverse conceptions of culture and personality through an interdisciplinary lens. By leveraging Lacan's theoretical framework to interpret Sapir's bold ideas on culture-personality dyad, it assesses integrating Lacanian subjectivity into the culture-individual relationship, bridging commonalities between the two fields and introducing insights into their interdisciplinary interplay. This book summarizes key findings from Lacanian subjectivity theory and examines a new perspective on the process of cultural transmission and socialization by highlighting Sapir`s pioneering view on the relationship between the individual and society. It also addresses ontological, epistemological, and methodological questions in anthropology through Lacanian dynamics of desire.

From the television we watch and the films we consume to the experience of user-generated content, this volume explores various forms of popular culture as teaching tools. Teaching popular culture well hinges on the application, not the mere inclusion of popular culture artifacts. It is the nuance of praxis where theory meets practice, the artful marriage of academic knowledge with popular culture. In this volume, the authors leverage popular culture as a powerful teaching tool that is familiar and accessible. This tool provides a lens for approaching complex academic experiences and elucidating new concepts in applications that have been tested and applied in the classroom. Each essay outlines the theory that underpins elegant integrations of popular culture into learning.

Higher education helps students along a transformative path to citizenship by providing knowledge and experiences that help them become effective and responsible participants in democracy. The pedagogies discussed in this book vary in the student populations they target, the courses to which they are linked, and the nature of the democratic principles to which students are exposed; nevertheless, the authors maintain a unified commitment to preparing students for a life of democratic citizenship. By teaching students citizenship skills, including expressing opinions, working collaboratively, and participating in dialogue and civic reasoning, students prepare to discuss major issues that they face nationally and locally. The authors' discussions of scholarly and practical knowledge about pedagogical strategies, such as dialogic and deliberative pedagogies, civility, civic education, and the social contract, position educators to help students learn about democracy through experiences and teach them strategies for engaging in productive disagreement. These steps are essential for active democratic engagement beyond the classroom. This goal animates Encouraging College Students' Democratic Engagement in an Era of Political Polarization. Each chapter offers insight into how higher education can infuse modern democracy with diverse voices, engaged citizens, and a reframing of political talk.

Yasmine Hasnaoui's, The Western Sahara Deadlock: Understanding Algeria's Role and the Path to Resolution, investigates the extent of continuity and change in Algeria's foreign policy during the Western Sahara Conflict following Algerian independence in 1962. The deterioration of diplomatic relations between Morocco and Algeria is a result of a deep-rooted rivalry over the Western Sahara conflict. Morocco's diplomatic discourse over the last decade asserts that Algeria's direct involvement in the Western Sahara conflict is the main reason for its perpetuation. Algeria, on the other hand, denies such accusations, claiming instead that the Sahara conflict is a UN matter and labelling Morocco as the last colonizing power on the African continent. In order to verify the validity of these contradictory allegations, Hasnaoui examines major factors, including geographical continuity and security interaction, that have influenced the creation and implementation of Algerian foreign policy with respect to the Western Sahara conflict. Hasnaoui sheds light on the current atmosphere of Algerian-Moroccan relations, the role of Algeria in the Western Sahara conflict, and the consequences related to its failure to achieve a full Maghreb Integration.

In this book, Ghanem Ayed Elhersh and Laeeq Khan critically examine the depiction of Arabs and Muslims in prominent Disney animated films through application of a rigorous, mixed-methods convergent parallel design. Blending framing analysis with quantitative textual analysis, Elhersh and Khan offer a comprehensive view of media portrayals and public perceptions and reveal how these films have frequently employed biased, negative, orientalist frames that associate Arabs and Muslims with violence, terrorism, and misogyny. Furthermore, they assess public reactions through advanced quantitative analysis of user reviews to uncover and analyze prevailing themes and sentiments in viewer feedback. By integrating interdisciplinary perspectives and meticulous methodology, this book provides an insightful exploration of the causative links between such portrayals and public attitudes, offering a vital resource for scholars, media professionals, and readers interested in the intersections of media, culture, and minority representation.

Amending our Pasts and Futures: Observing Media and Place as Means to Memory is an edited volume presenting original research from established and emerging scholars of public and collective memory. Contributors focus on topics including the memory of race and slavery, wars of oppression, and regional and ethnic identities to interrogate how we as collectives remember, commemorate, discuss, forget, and question what is historically revealed, appropriated, silenced, or concealed from public discourse. Through analyses of a wide range of cultural texts and contexts, contributors to this volume demonstrate the crucial role of communication and media in shaping public opinion-and our collective present more broadly-in an effort to amend our painful histories.

The Cruel and Reparative Possibilities of Failure brings together a variety of scholars and research across disciplines, with an emphasis on communication and gender studies, to work toward reimagining the idea of failure. Contributors consider failure as both a space for growth and repair and as a space from which hope can emerge. The collection is divided into five parts, investigating failure as consumption; failure as media; failure as pedagogy; failure as narrative; and finally, failure as transformation. Contributors spanning the fields of communication, gender, sexuality, performance, and media studies each employ unique disciplinary approaches to failure in their explorations of topics including queer counterpublics, corporeal commodification, misinformation, abolitionist principles, abuse and consent culture, and everyday organizing, among others. Looking to the future, the book takes these perspectives and experiences a step further to explore the reparative possibilities that may be found in failure.

Adam Mayer's Military Marxism: Africa's Contribution to Revolutionary Theory, 1957-2023 explores African Marxist theory to show how this school of thought has developed and impacted Sub-Saharan Africa from the Cold War to the present. The intellectual merits of Afro-Marxist schools of thought, and the efficacy of the movements that they influenced, are contested today. Through in-depth research, Mayer answers the following questions: Who were the African Marxist intellectuals? What happened to these intellectuals in the 1990s in NGO-administered, deindustrialized Africa? How are these theories inspiring popular rebellions and radical anti-Western military coups today? This book explores how Military Marxism, through its own rich and variegated African theory, has continued to inform and guide the practice of various political movements today.