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The Mediation of Touch
By Luce Irigaray. 2024
The first communication between human beings, the one between the newborn and the mother, happens through touch. Strangely this first…
way of relating to each other has barely been considered by our education and our culture, which have favoured sight to the detriment of touch. And yet touching and being touched means experiencing ourselves as living beings. For lack of such a touch, we do not perceive the limits nor the sensitive potential of our bodies. Then we remain immersed in a natural or a cultural universe, incapable of reaching our own individuation and of knowing our fundamental difference from the other(s).Desire, in particular sexuate desire, is a call for touching one another anew. But this touch requires us to have gained our autonomy and to be able to open up to and commune with the other as transcendent to ourselves while staying in ourselves. This book unveils and explores how touch can act as a basic living mediation in love and,more generally, in our comprehensive individual and collective human becoming. It also considers how touch can contribute to founding a culture respectful of difference instead of subjecting them to an ideal of sameness. We need touch as mediation to fulfil our humanity and to build a truly human thinking and world.Krisen des Feldzugangs: Methodologische, empirische und forschungspraktische Beiträge (Wissen, Kommunikation und Gesellschaft)
By Max Kaufmann, Sylvia Marlene Wilz. 2024
Dieses Buch bietet eine ausführliche und aktuelle Auseinandersetzung mit der Frage, wie der Zugang zum Forschungsfeld gelingen kann. Der Feldzugang…
ist eine notwendige Bedingung, um Feldforschung betreiben zu können – gelingt der Zugang zum Feld nicht, dann ist auch die geplante Forschung nicht möglich. Das Anbahnen eines Feldzugangs ist entsprechend eine besonders kritische Phase des Forschungsprozesses, die grundsätzlich die Eigenschaft hat, krisenhaft zu sein oder es zu werden. Diesen Sachverhalt stellt der Band in den Mittelpunkt und versammelt Beiträge, die das krisenhafte Potential von Feldzugängen aus drei Perspektiven diskutieren: Erstens mit Blick auf veränderte und erschwerte äußere Rahmenbedingungen qualitativer Forschung (Der Feldzugang in der Krise); zweitens aus einer wissenssoziologischen Sicht (Der Feldzugang als krisenhafter Prozess) und drittens aus der Perspektive der Forschungsfelder und -gegenstände (Der Feldzugang als Krise für den Forschungsgegenstand?). In dieser Diskussion verfolgt der Band das Ziel, Feldzugänge sowohl unter forschungspraktischen und methodologischen Gesichtspunkten zu erörtern als auch den Feldzugang als Forschungsgegenstand zu reflektieren. Der Band gibt Anregungen für alle, die ein empirisches Forschungsprojekt durchführen wollen und für die diejenigen, die ihre eigene Forschungspraxis selbstreflexiv thematisieren. Er bietet Anschlüsse an die ethnografische Literatur, Einblicke in die Arbeit der ethnografischen Feldforschung, und er bietet wichtige Impulse für die Debatte zur Zukunft der qualitativen Sozialforschung.Women and Redemption: A Theological History
By Rosemary Radford Ruether. 2012
Rosemary Radford Ruether's authoritative, award-winning critique of women's unequal standing in the church, which explored the complex history of redemption…
in evaluating conflict over the fundamental meaning of the Christian gospel for gender relations, is now in an updated and expanded edition. Ruether highlights women theologians' work to challenge the patriarchal paradigm of historical theology and present redemption linked to women's liberation. Ruether turns her attention to the situation of women globally and how the growing plurality of women's voices from multicultural and multireligious contexts articulates feminist liberation theology today.What compels a person to risk her life to change deeply rooted systems of injustice in ways that may not…
benefit her? The thousands of Black Churchwomen who took part in civil rights protests drew on faith, courage, and moral imagination to acquire the lived experiences at the heart of the answers to that question. AnneMarie Mingo brings these forgotten witnesses into the historical narrative to explore the moral and ethical world of a generation of Black Churchwomen and the extraordinary liberation theology they created. These women acted out of belief that what they did was bigger than themselves. Taking as their goal nothing less than the moral transformation of American society, they joined the movement because it was something they had to do. Their personal accounts of a lived religion enacted in the world provide powerful insights into how faith steels human beings to face threats, jail, violence, and seemingly implacable hatred. Throughout, Mingo draws on their experiences to construct an ethical model meant to guide contemporary activists in the ongoing pursuit of justice. A depiction of moral imagination that resonates today, Have You Got Good Religion? reveals how Black Churchwomen’s understanding of God became action and transformed a nation.Maverick Feminist: To Be Female and Black in a Country Founded upon Violence and Respectability
By Kemeshia Randle Swanson. 2024
Beginning with their forced introduction to American soil, Black women have relied on maverick-like characteristics to survive. And yet, these…
liberating qualities have been repeatedly disparaged by the masses in favor of an elitist politics of respectability. In Maverick Feminist: To Be Female and Black in a Country Founded upon Violence and Respectability, scholar Kemeshia Randle Swanson examines the extent to which the politics of respectability diminish joy and increase sorrow throughout the lifespan of Black women. By rejecting this damaging standard in society, Black women can wholly and attentively assist in the obliteration of racist, sexist, classist, and ableist oppression. But first, they must work towards becoming self-identified, self-actualized, and self-sexualized.Bridging the gap between women in both the streets and the academy, Maverick Feminist expands the traditional understandings of activism and enlarges discussions about Black female sexuality. Swanson emphasizes sexuality’s significance to the literary and sociopolitical success of Black women of the past and in this contemporary climate. Through close readings and critical analyses of fiction, nonfiction, and popular culture, Swanson argues that #BlackGirlMagic and racial progression require rejecting respectability politics and developing an intimate appreciation of self. Maverick Feminist examines texts by and about bold Black women, including Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever, Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Sapphire’s PUSH, Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Terry McMillan’s Getting to Happy, and Michelle Obama’s Becoming.Maverick Feminist offers hope concerning the growing divide between scholars and the communities about which they theorize. The book celebrates centuries of agency and control that Black women have mustered and maintained in a world that seems to want nothing more than to see them prone and powerless. Ultimately, maverick feminism provides a freer means of living out, evaluating, understanding, and improving the lives of Black women.Same Old Song: The Enduring Past in Popular Music (American Made Music Series)
By John Paul Meyers. 2024
Popular music and its listeners are strongly associated with newness and youth. Young people can stay up late dancing to…
the latest hits and use cutting-edge technology for listening to and sharing fresh music. Many young people incorporate their devotion to new artists and styles into their own developing personalities. However, if popular music is a genre meant for the youthful, what are listeners to make of the widespread sampling of music from decades-old R&B tracks, sold-out anniversary tours by aging musicians, retrospective box sets of vintage recordings, museum exhibits, and performances by current pop stars invoking music and images of the past? In Same Old Song: The Enduring Past in Popular Music, John Paul Meyers argues that these phenomena are part of what he calls “historical consciousness in popular music.” These deep relationships with the past are an important but underexamined aspect of how musicians and listeners engage with this key cultural form. In chapters ranging across the landscape of twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, Meyers finds indications of historical consciousness at work in multiple genres. Rock music canonizes its history in tribute performances and museums. Jazz and pop musicians cover tunes from the “Great American Songbook.” Hip-hop and contemporary R&B singers invoke Black popular music from the 1960s and 1970s. Examining the work of influential artists like Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Kanye West, Prince, D’Angelo, and Janelle Monáe, Meyers argues that contemporary artists’ homage to the past is key for understanding how music-lovers make meaning of popular music in the present.Her Truth and Service: Lucy Diggs Slowe in Her Own Words
By Lucy Diggs Slowe. 2024
Lucy Diggs Slowe (1885–1937) was one of the most remarkable and accomplished figures in the history of Black women’s higher…
education. She was a builder of institutions, organizing the first historically Black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, while a student at Howard University in 1908; establishing the first junior high school for Black students in Washington, D.C.; and founding as well as leading other major national and community organizations. In 1922 Slowe was appointed the first Dean of Women at Howard, making her the first Black woman to serve as dean at any American university. Beyond her trailblazing career in higher education, she was a committed teacher, an ardent antiracist advocate, and even a national tennis champion.Her Truth and Service showcases Slowe’s speeches, articles, and letters, illuminating her multifaceted accomplishments and unwavering dedication to the quest for equality and justice. In these texts, readers encounter Slowe’s powerful voice and keen intellect, witnessing her triumphs and travails as an educator, a leader, and a Black woman in a deeply exclusionary society. Slowe’s writings depict her personal and professional efforts to topple race and gender barriers and open up greater opportunities for Black women and girls, as well as the obstacles she faced in male-dominated institutions including the Howard administration. Her Truth and Service is an important document of a significant figure in the development of Black institutions and an inspiring testament to the lifelong struggle for social justice.There is one proven method for happier kids, more involved dads, and less stressed-out moms after divorce—50/50 custodyIt's hard for…
everyone when parents split up—but the end of living together doesn't need to mean the end of a functional family. Part of the reason divorces are so traumatic for the kids involved is because of our child custody system, which truly sets everyone up for failure. Throughout the country, the default arrangement is for Mom to get majority time with the kids (and most of the responsibility of caring for them), for Dad to become an occasional visitor (and perhaps saddled with massive child support payments), and for the kids to lose the stability, structure and confidence of knowing they have two equally committed, loving parents. But it doesn't have to be this way!In The 50/50 Solution, creator of the Wealthy Single Mommy community Emma Johnson showcases the robust research proving that, in the vast majority of cases, equal timesharing is the best outcome for everyone in a family where the adults no longer live together. The 50/50 Solution will show you that equal parenting time leads to:Better physical, emotional, and mental health for children of divorceHigher career earnings for single mothersFathers who are more engaged and whose rights as parents are preservedFar less parental and legal conflictA progressive, forward-thinking cultural norm that promotes gender and racial equality for all families, regardless of their configurationA few states have already adopted 50/50 custody as the default arrangement, and several more are poised to follow. Equal parenting time is the custody framework of the future, and The 50/50 Solution shows readers how it helps our families and communities thrive.Not So Weird After All: The Changing Relationship Between Status and Fertility (Evolutionary Analysis in the Social Sciences)
By Rosemary L. Hopcroft, Martin Fieder, Susanne Huber. 2024
This is the first book to fully examine, from an evolutionary point of view, the association of social status and…
fertility in human societies before, during, and after the demographic transition. In most nonhuman social species, social status or relative rank in a social group is positively associated with the number of offspring, with high-status individuals typically having more offspring than low-status individuals. However, humans appear to be different. As societies have gotten richer, fertility has dipped to unprecedented lows, with some developed societies now at or below replacement fertility. Within rich societies, women in higher-income families often have fewer children than women in lower-income families. Evolutionary theory suggests that the relationship between social status and fertility is likely to be somewhat different for men and women, so it is important to examine this relationship for men and women separately. When this is done, the positive association between individual social status and fertility is often clear in less-developed, pre-transitional societies, particularly for men. Once the demographic transition begins, it is elite families, particularly the women of elite families, who lead the way in fertility decline. Post-transition, the evidence from a variety of developed societies in Europe, North America and East Asia is that high-status men (particularly men with high personal income) do have more children on average than lower-status men. The reverse is often true of women, although there is evidence that this is changing in Nordic countries. The implications of these observations for evolutionary theory are also discussed. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in the social sciences with an interest in evolutionary sociology, evolutionary anthropology, evolutionary psychology, demography, and fertility.Show Thyself a Man: Georgia State Troops, Colored, 1865-1905 (Southern Dissent)
By Gregory Mixon. 2016
Georgia Historical Records Advisory Council award for Excellence in Research in Using the Holdings of Archives The history of Black militias…
in Georgia after the Civil War and their importance in defining citizenshipIn Show Thyself a Man, Gregory Mixon explores the ways in which African Americans in postbellum Georgia used militia service after the Civil War to define freedom and citizenship. Independent militias empowered them to get involved in politics, secure their own financial independence, and mobilize for self-defense.As whites and blacks competed for state sponsorship of their militia companies, African Americans sought to establish their roles as citizens of their country and their state. They proved their efficiency as militiamen and publicly commemorated black freedom and progress with celebrations such as Emancipation Day and the anniversaries of the Civil War Amendments.White Georgians, however, used the militia as a different symbol of freedom—to ensure not only the postwar white right to rule but to assert states’ rights. This social, political, and military history examines how Black militias were integral to the process of liberation, Reconstruction, and nation-building that defined the latter half of the nineteenth century South. A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. MillerThe Residential Is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership (Post*45)
By Adrienne Brown. 2024
Housing experts and activists have long described the foundational role race has played in the creation of mass homeownership. This…
book insistently tracks the inverse: the role of mass homeownership in changing the definition, perception, and value of race. In The Residential is Racial Adrienne Brown reveals how mass homeownership remade the rubrics of race, from the early cases realtors made for homeownership's necessity to white survival through to the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Reading real estate archives and appraisal textbooks alongside literary works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever, and Thomas Pynchon, Brown goes beyond merely identifying the discriminatory mechanisms that the real estate industry used to forestall black homeownership. Rather, she reveals that redlining and other forms of racial discrimination are perceptual modes, changing what it means to sense race and assign it value. Resituating residential discrimination as a key moment within the history of perception and aesthetics as well as of policy, demography, and democracy, we get an even more expansive picture of both its origins and its impacts. This book discovers that the racial honing of perception on the block—seeing race like a bureaucrat, an appraiser, and a homeowner—has become central to the functioning of the residential itself.Understanding Muslim Family Life: Changing Relationships, Personal Life and Inequality
By Joanne Britton. 2024
This book offers an innovative perspective on Muslim family life in British society. Drawing on recent debates, the book considers…
how theories of family have overlooked Muslim families and offers a comprehensive framework to address this oversight. Informed by decolonizing approaches, the book sheds light on the impact of narrow and stigmatizing perspectives that shape our understanding of Muslim families. The author pays close attention to the increasing diversity of family forms and to the role of gender and generation, whilst also considering race, ethnicity and class. In doing so, she demonstrates how a better understanding of Muslim family life can inform policies to address inequalities, and advocates for placing Muslim families at the heart of policy solutions.Why did a rural dialect from the heart of Norwegian farm country win a national dialect popularity contest? What were…
the effects of this win, and what has happened to the winning dialect since? A Winning Dialect tells a story of linguistic and cultural transformation in the rural district of Valdres, Norway. It shows how lifelong residents have adapted to changing social, economic, and political circumstances – particularly the shift from family farming to tourism development – and how they have used local linguistic and cultural resources to craft a viable future for themselves and the places their ancestors have called home for centuries. Once stigmatized as poor and uneducated, the distinctive dialect of Valdres now holds a special place as a valuable part of Norwegian national heritage, as well as a marker of local belonging. Based on two decades of research and fieldwork, A Winning Dialect considers how a traditional dialect is transformed – linguistically and culturally – as it is put to new uses in the contemporary world.The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us from Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild
By Susan J. Douglas. 2010
Women today are inundated with conflicting messages from the mass media: they must either be strong leaders in complete command…
or sex kittens obsessed with finding and pleasing a man. In The Rise Of Enlightened Sexism, Susan J. Douglas, one of America's most entertaining and insightful cultural critics, takes readers on a spirited journey through the television programs, popular songs, movies, and news coverage of recent years, telling a story that is nothing less than the cultural biography of a new generation of American women.Revisiting cultural touchstones from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Survivor to Desperate Housewives, Douglas uses wit and wisdom to expose these images of women as mere fantasies of female power, assuring women and girls that the battle for equality has been won, so there's nothing wrong with resurrecting sexist stereotypes—all in good fun, of course. She shows that these portrayals not only distract us from the real-world challenges facing women today but also drive a wedge between baby-boom women and their "millennial" daughters.In seeking to bridge this generation gap, Douglas makes the case for casting aside these retrograde messages, showing us how to decode the mixed messages that restrict the ambitions of women of all ages. And what makes The Rise Of Enlightened Sexism such a pleasure to read is Douglas's unique voice, as she blends humor with insight and offers an empathetic and sisterly guide to the images so many American women love and hate with equal measure.Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of America
By Richard Gergel. 2019
*The book that inspired the 2021 PBS American Experience documentary, The Blinding of Isaac Woodard.*How the blinding of Sergeant Isaac…
Woodard changed the course of America’s civil rights history.Richard Gergel’s Unexampled Courage details the impact of the blinding of Sergeant Woodard on the racial awakening of President Truman and Judge Waring, and traces their influential roles in changing the course of America’s civil rights history. On February 12, 1946, Sergeant Isaac Woodard, a returning, decorated African American veteran, was removed from a Greyhound bus in Batesburg, South Carolina, after he challenged the bus driver’s disrespectful treatment of him. Woodard, in uniform, was arrested by the local police chief, Lynwood Shull, and beaten and blinded while in custody.President Harry Truman was outraged by the incident. He established the first presidential commission on civil rights and his Justice Department filed criminal charges against Shull. In July 1948, following his commission’s recommendation, Truman ordered an end to segregation in the U.S. armed forces. An all-white South Carolina jury acquitted Shull, but the presiding judge, J. Waties Waring, was conscience-stricken by the failure of the court system to do justice by the soldier. Waring described the trial as his “baptism of fire,” and began issuing major civil rights decisions from his Charleston courtroom, including his 1951 dissent in Briggs v. Elliott declaring public school segregation per se unconstitutional. Three years later, the Supreme Court adopted Waring’s language and reasoning in Brown v. Board of Education.Naturally Selective: Evolution, Orgasm, and Female Choice
By Robert King. 2024
Researchers of human behaviour have identified an "orgasm gap": Men usually orgasm during intercourse, whereas women often do not. This…
book addresses this mystery. The two leading explanations are either that women are “psychologically broken” - Freud’s theory – or badly designed – the “by-product theory.” However, there is a much more compelling third explanation. Evolutionary biology, anatomy, physiology, and direct sex research suggest women have evolved under their own selection pressures and orgasm is a fitness-increasing consequence of such selective factors. This is revealed in their patterns of orgasmic response, which are neither random nor inexplicable.Key Features• Synthesizes decades of peer-reviewed sex research in anatomy, biology, physiology, and behavior.• Engagingly written based on feedback from students, peers, and interested lay persons.• Makes sense of the “orgasm gap” between men and women.• Provides a wider context of human sexual dimorphism and mutual sexual selection.• Balances sex research and real-world research and practical applications.This book analyzes the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945–1952). It begins by explaining why Japan spent roughly fifty years building…
its own colonial system and declaring war on China and the Western Allies, only to decide after military defeats, two atomic bombings and the Soviet declaration of war, to surrender before being invaded. It goes on to describe the controversial issues surrounding the conduct of the Occupation forces, the largely American reform proposals and the shifts in policy as the Cold War developed. Particular emphasis is placed on women’s issues, the Japanese and American reactions to President Truman’s decision to fire General Douglas MacArthur, the tensions surrounding the requirement that the Japanese allow US military bases to stay in Japan and the still ongoing debate over the American decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan. Despite all this, the book concludes that particularly when compared with later Allied nation building efforts in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq and the current state of US politics, the Occupation experience was, on the whole, a relatively positive one for both the Japanese and the US-Japan alliance.Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World
By M. R. O'Connor. 2019
At once far flung and intimate, a fascinating look at how finding our way make us human."A marvel of storytelling."…
—Kirkus (Starred Review) In this compelling narrative, O'Connor seeks out neuroscientists, anthropologists and master navigators to understand how navigation ultimately gave us our humanity. Biologists have been trying to solve the mystery of how organisms have the ability to migrate and orient with such precision—especially since our own adventurous ancestors spread across the world without maps or instruments. O'Connor goes to the Arctic, the Australian bush and the South Pacific to talk to masters of their environment who seek to preserve their traditions at a time when anyone can use a GPS to navigate. O’Connor explores the neurological basis of spatial orientation within the hippocampus. Without it, people inhabit a dream state, becoming amnesiacs incapable of finding their way, recalling the past, or imagining the future. Studies have shown that the more we exercise our cognitive mapping skills, the greater the grey matter and health of our hippocampus. O'Connor talks to scientists studying how atrophy in the hippocampus is associated with afflictions such as impaired memory, dementia, Alzheimer’s Disease, depression and PTSD. Wayfinding is a captivating book that charts how our species' profound capacity for exploration, memory and storytelling results in topophilia, the love of place."O'Connor talked to just the right people in just the right places, and her narrative is a marvel of storytelling on its own merits, erudite but lightly worn. There are many reasons why people should make efforts to improve their geographical literacy, and O'Connor hits on many in this excellent book—devouring it makes for a good start." —Kirkus ReviewsThe Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War
By David Livingstone Smith. 2007
Almost 200 million human beings, mostly civilians, have died in wars over the last century, and there is no end…
of slaughter in sight.The Most Dangerous Animal asks what it is about human nature that makes it possible for human beings to regularly slaughter their own kind. It tells the story of why all human beings have the potential to be hideously cruel and destructive to one another. Why are we our own worst enemy? The book shows us that war has been with us---in one form or another---since prehistoric times, and looking at the behavior of our close relatives, the chimpanzees, it argues that a penchant for group violence has been bred into us over millions of years of biological evolution. The Most Dangerous Animal takes the reader on a journey through evolution, history, anthropology, and psychology, showing how and why the human mind has a dual nature: on the one hand, we are ferocious, dangerous animals who regularly commit terrible atrocities against our own kind, on the other, we have a deep aversion to killing, a horror of taking human life. Meticulously researched and far-reaching in scope and with examples taken from ancient and modern history, The Most Dangerous Animal delivers a sobering lesson for an increasingly dangerous world.Kingdom of Lies: Unnerving Adventures in the World of Cybercrime
By Kate Fazzini. 2019
“Wow. Kate Fazzini is the rare top-level reporter who can make you see, smell and feel a hidden world, not…
just understand it. Cybercrime (and security) has found its Michael Lewis.” —Bret Witter, co-author of the #1 NYT bestseller The Monuments MenOne of BookRiot's "50 of the Best Books to Read This Summer"In the tradition of Michael Lewis and Tom Wolfe, a fascinating and frightening behind-the-scenes look at the interconnected cultures of hackers, security specialists, and law enforcementA 19-year-old Romanian student stumbles into a criminal ransomware ring in her village. Soon she is extorting Silicon Valley billionaires for millions--without knowing the first thing about computers.A veteran cybersecurity specialist has built a deep network of top notch hackers in one of the world’s largest banks. But then the bank brings in a cadre of ex-military personnel to “help.” A cynical Russian only leaves his tiny New Jersey apartment to hack sports cars at a high performance shop in Newark. But he opens his door to a consultant who needs his help. A hotel doorman in China once served in the People’s Army, stealing intellectual property from American companies. Now he uses his skills to build up a private side-business selling the data he takes from travelers to Shanghai’s commercial center. Kingdom of Lies follows the intertwined stories of cybercriminals and ethical hackers as they jump from criminal trend to criminal trend, crisis to crisis. A cybersecurity professional turned journalist, Kate Fazzini illuminates the many lies companies and governments tell us about our security, the lies criminals tell to get ahead, and the lies security leaders tell to make us think they are better at their jobs than they are.Like Traffic set in the cybercrime world, Kingdom of Lies is as entertaining as it is eye opening.