Books published by Cambria Press

Spanning across playwrights, performers, critics, and theatrical commemorations, this book raises controversy about familiar figures and brings attention to neglected ones. Thomas F. Connolly opens his book with a provocative essay subtitled "Notional Culture." The first sentence: "Postmodernism makes others of us all," introduces Connolly's confrontational approach to the study of culture. The introduction takes readers from Montaigne's "Cannibals" to Madison Avenue "gangsta" wannabes, while explicating the impulses behind formal classification that have driven intellectual pursuits from the Early Modern Period through postmodernism. The chapter on Eugene O'Neill argues that his colossal status as the "greatest American playwright" has been imposed upon him and reduces his stature as a world playwright. Connolly is the major scholar of American drama critics and the essay on John Mason Brown has been called "a fascinating and important piece" by leading theatre historian David Savran. Other chapters on major European performers: Noël Coward, Micheál Mac Liammóir, Alexander Moissi and Viennese theatrical culture, offer analysis of self-creation, the superficiality of national identity, and the ways governments use performers. Genus Envy is an important book for all theatre, cultural studies, and literature collections.

This book is an interdisciplinary collection of essays on the society and cultures of twenty-first century Japanese transnationals: first-generation migrants (Issei), and their descendants who were born and grew up outside Japan (Nikkei); and Japanese nationals who today find themselves living overseas. The authors-international specialists from anthropology, sociology, history, and education-explore how individual and community cultural identities are deeply integrated in ethnic and economic structures, and how cultural heritage is manifested in various Japanese transnational communities. These papers use individual cases to tackle the bigger issues of personal identity, ethnic community, and economic survival in an internationalized global world. This book, then, offers new perspectives on the anthropology, sociology, history, and economics of an important, though largely under-reported, transnational community. While previous studies have focused on a few specific and well-known cases-for example, the World War II internment of Japanese Americans and their attempts at redress, Japanese agriculture workers in Brazil, or temporary "returnee" dekasegi workers-this book examines Japanese transnationalism from a broader perspective, including Japanese nationals living overseas permanently or temporarily, and Europeans of Japanese ancestry who have recently rediscovered their Japanese roots. Besides looking at Japanese and Nikkei migrants in North and South America, this volume examines some little-explored venues such as Indonesia, Spain, and Germany. The connections among all these Japanese transnational communities-real or imagined are explored ethnographically and historically. And instead of simply focusing on social problems resulting from racial discrimination-and the political actions involved in implementing or fighting it-this volume offers more nuanced dialogue about the issues involved with Japanese transnationalism, in particular how ethnic identity is formed and how Japanese transnational communities have been created, and re-created, all over the world. Also, while until now less attention has been paid to fitting the Japanese case into a larger theoretical framework of globalization and migration studies, the papers presented here-along with a detailed theoretical introduction-attempt to rectify this.

This book examines user perceptions of European Union institutions and compares them to perceptions communicators within these institutions have of their users. Analysing the images both sides have through their interaction on the EUROPA website (www.europa.eu) helps to to show where communicator intentions and user perceptions do or do not overlap. The timeliness of this issue could not be more striking than in the current internal and external debates surrounding the EU (e.g., the "No" votes on the common constitution). With this in mind, every possible way of interaction should be reconsidered, in order for citizens to get more involved and feel more connected. Next to mass media, the Internet plays an increasingly important role in people's lives. Even though the Internet may not currently be a dominant source of information about the RU relative to other mass media outlets, it continues to increase in importance as part of most people's everyday life, in particular for the younger generation who turn to it for information. The main focus of this book is on the integration of both the user and the communicator perspectives. By looking at user needs in comparison to the production processes that determine the information structure of a Web site, the usability of a Web site is defined. The user experience online in turn determines the users' perceptions of the institutions and their attitudes towards the European Union.

The history of Singapore has been widely conflated with the history of its economic success. From its heyday as a nexus of trade during the imperial era to the modern city state that boasts high living standards for most of its citizens, the history of Singapore is commonly viewed through the lens of the ruling elite. Published in two volumes in 1998 and 2000, Lee Kuan Yew's memoirs The Singapore Story epitomizes this top-down definitive narrative of the nation's past. The history of post-war Singapore has largely been reduced to a series of decisions made by the nation's leaders. Few existing studies explore the role and experiences of the ordinary person in Singapore's post-war history. There are none that do this through ethnography, oral history, and collective biography. In a critical study that has no parallel among existing works on Singapore history, this book dispenses with the homogenous historical experience that is commonly presumed in the writing of Singapore's national past after 1945 and explores how the enforcement of a uniform language policy by the Singapore government for cultural and economic purposes has created underappreciated social and economic divides among the Chinese of Singapore both between and within families. It also demonstrates how mapping distinct economic, linguistic, and cultural cleavages within Singaporean Chinese society can add new and critical dimensions to understanding the nation's past and present. Chief among these, the author argues, are the processes behind the creation and entrenchment of class structures in the city state, such as the increasing value of English as a form of opportunity-generating capital.

This innovative approach is based primarily on Gordon's abundant private papers, colonial office patronage files, territorial files, and colonial office lists of appointments and promotions in the crown colonies he governed. By digging deeper and using these neglected tools, his personal network of friends and allies can be reconstructed and its utility for his administrative purposes and his career advancement assessed. Moreover, since the 1960s, there has been a steady output of country histories using local records as well as metropolitan sources and providing a better contextual background to Gordon's work. This is especially true for crown colonies in the West Indies and the Indian Ocean in the aftermath of slave emancipation, where Gordon encountered planter opposition to reform of immigrant indenture. It is no less true for Fiji and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) where there is a particular need to reassess the work of a man who is held responsible, in the first case, for creating an administrative system that entrenched indigenous political and economic rights at the expense of Indian settlers, and in the second for holding his civil service in contempt and favouring the leaders of one indigenous caste at the expense of others. For New Brunswick and New Zealand, too, there are strong reasons for revising earlier judgements concerning his role in applying imperial policy in the period before Canadian confederation or for exceeding his constitutional role in investigating Maori land issues. The intended academic readership, therefore, includes political scientists and anthropologists with an interest in patron-client relations, as well as students and historians familiar with the controversies surrounding imperial studies and the emergence of new states.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was the most influential, challenging, and provocative pacifist of his generation. The most famous person alive at the dawn of the twentieth century, his international stature came not only from his great novels but from his rejection of violence and the state. Tolstoy was a strict pacifist in the last three decades of his life, and wrote at length on a central issue of politics, namely, the use of violence to maintain order, to promote justice, and to ensure the survival of society, civilization, and the human species. He unreservedly rejected the use of physical force to these or any ends. Tolstoy was a religious pacifist rather than an ethical or political one. His pacifism was rooted not in a moral doctrine or political theory but in his straightforward reading of the teachings of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels. Despite his fame, Tolstoy's pacifism remains insufficiently studied. A hundred years after his death, Tolstoy is a figure unfamiliar in political science, encountered, if at all, as the author of hortatory quotations on the wrongness of political violence or of allegiance to the state. This work of political science offers an account of Leo Tolstoy as a Christian thinker on political violence. It presents Tolstoy's pacifism as a striking case of the impact of religious idealism on political attitudes. The Russian novelist offers an instructive case study in Christian pacifism and in the attractions and failings of strict, literalist, and simplistic religious approaches to the many and complex issues of politics. Today, the political implications of religious fundamentalism, scriptural literalism, and Christian faith are very much live issues and the contemporary discussion of them should not omit pacifism. In this first study of Tolstoy's pacifism by a political scientist, Colm McKeogh unravels the complexities of Tolstoy's writings on Christianity and political violence. This work serves scholars of political science by bringing together relevant extracts from Tolstoy's writings and providing a succinct treatment of the core political issues. It establishes that Tolstoy's stance is primarily one of non-violence rather than non-resistance. McKeogh's work then assesses the internal consistency of Tolstoy's pacifism, its grounding in the Gospels and Christian tradition, its political and anti-political implications, and the meaning in life that it offers. It finds that Tolstoy does great service to the pacifist cause (with his defense of peace as close to the centre of Christ's message) and yet harm to it too (by divorcing peace from the love that is even more central to Christ's message). Tolstoy's political and religious legacy is not that of a prophet, a social activist, a moral reformer, a political idealist or pacifist theorist but that of a dissident. Tolstoy stands as one of the great dissidents of twentieth-century Russia, a man who condemned the system utterly and who refused to perform any act that could be construed as compromising with it. He left behind a powerful statement of the urgent human need to connect our daily living to a deep and fulfilling conception of the meaning of life. Tolstoy's Pacifism is important for political science, Christian ethics, literature, and Russian collections.

This book constitutes a major reassessment of the mortuary remains from the two X-Group royal cemeteries at Qustul and Ballana in Lower Nubia (c. AD 380-500). Since their excavation more than seventy years ago, and the subsequent flooding of the sites following the building of the Aswan High Dam, and despite the spectacular nature of the finds, the sites have received remarkably little scholarly attention. This book offers the first interpretation of social life at these key sites, and proposes a series of innovative, theoretically informed frames for exploring the significance of the material remains found there. In doing so, it sheds new light on a culture which, although less well known than the Meroitic Empire that preceded it and the subsequent development of the Christian Kingdoms of the Sudan, is nevertheless of considerable archaeological and historical significance. The sites present a series of archaeologically unique monumental tumuli and multi-chambered tomb structures containing evidence of human and animal sacrifice, as well as a highly sophisticated material culture. The interpretations presented here draw on the emergent field of sensory archaeology to address the key issue of identity formation. It makes a case for the heretofore unrecognised significance of an 'aesthetic' identity mediated by material culture. It approaches X-Group culture as a materially complex indigenous culture that created and altered identities through time via the manipulation of materials, colours and patterns (the 'aesthetic' basis of identity). This study explores the relationships between humans, animals, and artefacts. It demonstrates how a less stable society, which based control on aggressive public displays, became a more stable state, as power was mediated by magico-ritual performances, festal occasions, and the rise of certain individuals. The interpretations put forward here are based on a systematic quantitative analysis of the archaeological material from the sites. These analyses draw on complex typologies differentiating objects according to use, ware, colour, decoration method, designs, surface finish, contents, grafitto, location in a tomb, location near a body, etc. Such a quantification and synthesis of tens of thousands of individual pieces of data enabled the identification of key trends in the dataset--the empirical basis for the modelling of socio-political change undertaken here. The study was undertaken to combat the limited and unsatisfactory set of questions posed by previous debates about the activities at Qustul and Ballana. It constitutes a significant departure from previous work which restricted the discussion of life at the sites to a limited debate about the identity of tribal groups and the chronology of activity at the sites. In contrast, this research demonstrates that the way in which the X-Group(s) dynamically created, maintained, and altered their identity through various forms of praxis. The book is essential reading for anybody researching ancient Sudanese civilisations. It has a wider appeal for researchers and graduate students interested in new developments in approaches to the archaeology of North-East Africa. It also has a broader appeal to all those interested in the theorisation of identity, the practical application of archaeological theory to the study of material culture and the human relationship to the sensory nature of the sensory world.

This book establishes the restored version of Jennie Gerhardt as a far better piece of literature than the 1911 edition. It is also the first extensive study of the damaging effects of the editorial process on a significant work of American literature. This study carefully compares the restored edition to the 1911 edition, revealing clear and precise patterns to the Harper editing. These patterns, in turn, suggest that the Harper editors deliberately approached Dreiser's original manuscript with the intention of softening its social and moral content. This study argues that the firm's historical emphasis on family values and its lengthy bout with bankruptcy and reorganization, coupled with the conservative social and moral climate at the turn of the century, motivated the house to edit the novel with a heavy and censorious hand. The end result was a more agreeable and, therefore, more saleable book. This study also provides an extensive discussion on the probable reasons why Dreiser acquiesced to changes he felt were not in the best interest of his novel. By continually placing material from the 1911 edition alongside that of the restored edition and then situating the cuts and emendations within their appropriate thematic, historical, cultural, social, moral, biographical, and autobiographical contexts, readers will see how the editors distorted Dreiser's original writing of every major character, their interaction with their environment, and their relationship with others. Readers will also see how the editing blunted, and in some cases completely erased, Dreiser's criticism of the wealthy capitalist; society's understanding and treatment of the poor, the working class, and the immigrant; and traditional notions of motherhood, womanhood, relationships, and the American Dream. This study argues that once Dreiser's original language is restored, Jennie Gerhardt can stand alongside Dreiser's other novels and can add to critical discussions on class, gender, morality, ethnicity, naturalism, and romanticism in Dreiser's fiction. The Trouble with Dreiser: Harper and the Editing of Jennie Gerhardt is an important work for collections of American literature, Theodore Dreiser, textual studies, early twentieth-century cultural studies (especially those interested in ethnicity), and early twentieth-century historical studies.

"Deniers of climate change have benefited from political strategies developed by conservative think tanks and public relations experts paid handsomely by the energy industry. With this book, environmental activists can benefit from some scholarly attention turned to their efforts. This book exhibits the best that public scholarship has to offer. Its authors utilize sophisticated rhetorical theory and criticism to uncover the inventional constraints and possibilities for participants at various sites of the Step-It-Up day of climate activism. What makes this book especially valuable is that it is not only directed to fellow communication scholars, but is written in a clear and accessible style to bring the insights of an academic field to a broader public of activists committed to building an environmental social movement." - Prof. Leah Ceccarelli, University of Washington "This is an unusually interesting volume grounded in a sustained and coordinated analysis of the Step It Up campaign. Generating a multifaceted and shared archive for analyzing the SIU campaign on global warming, the volume's multiple authors critically examine intersecting dimensions of the SIU campaign-its persuasive strategies, organizational dynamics, and political practices for everyday citizens-with an eye on implications for enhancing the larger environmental movement. Readers with a practical and theoretical interest in social and political movements will find this book engaging and leavened with heuristic value." - Professor Robert L. Ivie, Indiana University, Bloomington

Increasingly, Americans are turning away from the traditional press--especially newspapers--for the news of the day. In fact, by May 2009 a Pew survey revealed that 63 percent of Americans said they would not miss their paper if it ceased publishing. Other surveys have revealed that since the late 1990s, Americans have significant concerns about the mainstream news media's credibility, with no less than 56 percent voicing reservations about the press's accuracy. At the same time, the mainstream news has continued to show a proclivity for using information proffered by public relations sources; in fact, some studies point to newsrooms that use such propaganda materials for up to 75-80 percent of their stories. As traditional newsrooms continue to either downsize (or, in some cases, disappear) and propaganda materials proliferate, the American public will continue to encounter difficulties obtaining from journalism the accurate and relevant information it needs to make informed decisions within our democracy. Current scholarship about journalism's increasing problems with relevancy often focuses on explorations of the advent of new media technologies and/or journalism's dysfunctional business models. Although those studies are important, they tend toward a presentism that ignores dilemmas that derive from the enduring ways that the press gathers and constructs news. This book argues that the problem of press relevancy can be traced to historical groundings that continue to inform newsroom practices. Specifically, it makes the distinctive claim that modern journalism's own professionalism has made the press prone to using propaganda materials, thus contributing to increasing news media irrelevance. Accordingly, this work provides an unparalleled interlocking interrogation of two areas: first, how the professionalizing press of the post-WWI era gradually progressed from resistance to acclimation as regards domestic propaganda and, second, how that acclimation can be understood as part of a historically grounded, self-rationalizing workroom acculturation known as habitus. Inspired by the works of Pierre Bourdieu, James Carey, and Michael Schudson, this work finds that journalism's current problems with pertinence lies within an unreflexive relationship with those who would offer the helping hand of propaganda materials. Today's news media exhibits a double-mindedness: many of the same professional routines it uses to apparently safeguard its credibility also rationalize the use of propaganda as news. This work maintains that news professionals and media scholars need to better recognize how this ingrained, yet dissonant approach to constructing news accounts has damaged the viability of journalism. From such an understanding, the press can better focus on news that is credible, pertinent, and reflective of the wider range of voices in American society. Press Professionalization and Propaganda is an important book for all journalism, public relations, and media studies collections and scholars in those areas. Professionals in journalism and public relations will also find this book compelling.

The Victorian freak show was at once mainstream and subversive. Spectacles of strange, exotic, and titillating bodies drew large middle-class audiences in England throughout much of the nineteenth century, and souvenir portraits of performing freaks even found their way into Victorian family albums. At the same time, the imagery and practices of the freak show shocked Victorian sensibilities and sparked controversy about both the boundaries of physical normalcy and morality in entertainment. Marketing tactics for the freak show often made use of common ideological assumptions-compulsory female domesticity and British imperial authority, for instance-but reflected these ideas with the surreal distortion of a fun-house mirror. Not surprisingly, the popular fiction written for middle-class Victorian readers also calls upon imagery of extreme physical difference, and the odd-bodied characters that people nineteenth-century fiction raise meaningful questions about the relationships between physical difference and the social expectations that shaped Victorian life. The academic discipline of disability studies has emerged in the last few decades to encourage aesthetic, philosophical, and political discussions of the significance of disability and physical difference. This field ultimately seeks to expand the rights and social roles offered to those whose bodies defy the norm, but it also explores the subtle ways in which art, literature, spectacle, and other cultural traditions encode physical difference with ideological meaning. Just as feminism, queer theory, and other areas of cultural study have addressed both specific representations of the body and the larger systems of social power that shape how we see and interpret physicality, so too does disability studies seek both the reexamination of cultural works in light of physical difference and the illumination of ways in which physical bodies unlock or foreclose access to power. This book applies the practices of disability studies to the context of Victorian popular fiction. It offers new ways of reading the works of some of the nineteenth century's most beloved writers through their approach to physical difference. It also seeks to renew critical interest in popular novels that, while rarely taught in the academic world, still paint complex, intriguing portraits of Victorian ideology and experience. This book is primarily an aesthetic analysis of freak show imagery as it appears in Victorian popular fiction, including the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Guy de Maupassant, Florence Marryat, and Lewis Carroll. It argues that, in spite of a strong nineteenth-century impulse to define and defend normalcy, images of radical physical difference are often framed in surprisingly positive ways in Victorian fiction. The dwarves, fat people, and bearded ladies who intrude on the more conventional imagery of Victorian novels serve to shift the meaning of those works' main plots and characters, sometimes sharpening satires of the nineteenth-century treatment of the poor or disabled, sometimes offering new traits and behaviors as supplements for restrictive social norms. In particular, this book points out unexpected connections between the cultural iconography of the freak show and fiction's response to middle-class ideals for women and girls. It argues that images of positively-encoded difference-such as the exaggerated nurturance of Dickens's fat women and the traditionally-male strengths of Collins and Marryat's bearded ladies-nudge Victorian ideology towards more inclusive and flexible gender norms. The Victorian Freak Show will interest scholars of nineteenth-century fiction, as well as readers concerned with disability rights or the relationship between ideology and the body.

This book introduces the resources of contemporary social system theory, as pioneered by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann and associated theorists. Luhmann's theory is very different from the general systems approach that dominated sociological thought for several decades after the Second World War. Norms and functions are not seen as fundamental premises of social systems and social order. Rather meaning, communication, and observation are set into the core of social life and its analysis. Meaning is seen as a medium that couples psychic and social systems or consciousness and communication. Observation is described as the introduction of distinctions and selections, and communication is the basic operation that connects observations and thereby allows for the emergence of observers: persons, interaction systems, organizations, and functional subsystems of society, such as the economy, politics, law, and art. Society itself is conceived as the encompassing unity of all communication, a universal set of references that makes observation and communication possible. Modern system theory does not join the quest for essential variables such as norms, values, or institutions. It selects observations and depicts their connectivity, their potential for processing information, building expectations about meaning in the world, and for structuring social systems. Contemporary social systems theory tries to explain the probability of the improbable: that communication occurs and reproduces a universe of meaning in which observers may orient themselves. Social system theory incorporates fresh insights from cognitive biology, the philosophy of consciousness, phenomenology, distinction theory, socio-cybernetics, and constructivism to explain the emergence of society. The authors of Observing Society describe how the theory moves beyond traditional sociological paradigms that attempt to explain social order and understanding with presumptions of intersubjectivity, collective conscience, communicative rationality, or normative consensus. Observing Society: Meaning, Communication, and Social Systems concisely outlines how social system theory offers sociologists an integrated set of practical and general analytical concepts, a promising agenda for scholarly inquiry, and a cutting-edge description of modern society. Using clear illustrations and effectively citing original material previously unavailable in English, Lee and Brosziewski carefully explain the logic of drawing distinctions to make observations, the concepts of meaning and communication, the forms of communication media such as speech and writing, the evolution of forms of organizing society, the functional differentiation of modern systems, and how social system theory informs sociological research and methodology. This book will hold significant relevance for collections in sociology, philosophy, German studies, European studies, and culture and media studies.

Among the success stories of economic development through hi-tech industries, the emergence of India as a major center in the world for software production and exports stands out. This is a fascinating story of economic development in a poor and technologically underdeveloped economy that surged to prominence within a relatively short period of less than two decades. The industry has sustained annual growth rates in excess of 35% for over 15 years since the early 1990s, when the country embarked upon an ambitious economic reforms program. However, within the country, the growth of this industry has been highly uneven, with the southern and the western regions leading the rest of the country. This trend has drawn attention to the role of regional policies in the development of this industry. Investigating these issues in depth will help us understand how the state can play a role in propelling an economy forward. The book also compares the different ways in which three states in southern India have established their software industries, illuminating the multiple pathways that are available to developing regions for industrial development, as well as how they affect the type and structure of the industry that evolve. In this first comprehensive study of the role of regional policies in the development of software industry in India, Rajendra Kumar explains the success of these states in terms of four critical factors: availability of adequate skilled labor and specialized infrastructure, pro-employer labor and policy reforms, ethnic linkages of immigrant professionals abroad who returned to establish firms in their native states, and their existing technological capabilities at the beginning of reforms. Contrary to common explanations in the literature, the state did not play a significant role in providing specialized R&D or finance to the industry. He also presents a new "Competitive Flexibility" model and shows that increasing globalization presents tremendous opportunities for developing regions to become globally competitive in a hi-tech field. This is an important book for all scholars and policy makers interested in economic development through high-technology-based industries.

India's cooperative dairying program is widely celebrated as an example of successful rural development, yet the meanings of this success have been understood mainly through the pronouncements of national and international development agencies. Within such official narratives, there has been relatively little engagement with the geographies of dairy development, both its place-specific productions through political contests, availabilities of labor, and distributions of agricultural resources, and the unevenness of its outcomes across rural India. This absence is even more surprising given that village-level cooperatives comprise the foundation of India's dairy development program, and the work of women within rural households is continuously invoked as an integral part of the dairy work. This book extends and enriches current understandings of cooperative dairying in India to show both its value to rural communities as well as the limitations of its participatory structures. Combining comparative and ethnographic approaches, explanations for the diverse outcomes of cooperative dairying are provided from the perspective of the people and places directly involved in the everyday reproductions of rural development. This book contributes to existing understandings of rural development and rural geographies in four significant ways. First, by following histories of development from their local origins to their national and international appearances, the global genealogies that are usually attached to development are rendered more complex. Second, by connecting cooperatives to place, the ways in which participation in development reflects local struggles for power and, hence, are structured through local inequalities, is revealed. Third, by linking dairying and agriculture, the continuing importance of resource distributions in shaping the outcomes of rural development is highlighted. Finally, the crucial role of household divisions of labor in the success of village dairy cooperatives is explicated through showing how struggles over the meanings of rural women's work become key to enabling household-level participation in dairying. This book will be of interest to scholars in a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields, including geography, sociology, anthropology, rural studies, development studies, gender studies, and regional studies of India.

The Evolution of Aesthetic and Expressive Dance in Boston provides a regional history of the physical education pioneers who established the groundwork for women to participate in movement and expression. Their schools and their writing offer insights into the powerful cultural changes that were reconfiguring women's perceptions of their bodies in motion. The book examines the history from the first successful school of ballroom dance run by Lorenzo Papanti to the establishment of the Braggiotti School by Berthe and Francesca Braggiotti (two wealthy Bostonian socialites who used their power and money to support dance in Boston). The Delsartean ideas about beauty and the expressive capacity of the body freed upper-class women to explore movement beyond social dance and to enjoy movement as artistic self expression. Their interest and pleasure in early "parlor forms" engaged them as sponsors and advocates of expressive dance. Although revolutionaries such as Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis also garnered support from Boston and New York's social sets, in Boston the relationship of the city's elite and its native dancers was both intimate and ongoing. The Braggiotti sisters did not use this support to embark on international tours; instead they founded a school that educated the children of their sponsors and offered performances for their own community. Although later artists, Miriam Winslow and Hans Weiner, did tour nationally and internationally, the intimate relationships they maintained with the upper echelon of Boston society required that they remain sensitive to the needs of their students and their community. Through the study of these schools, the reader is offered a unique perspective on the evolution of expressive dance as it unfolded in Boston and its environs. The Evolution of Aesthetic and Expressive Dance in Boston is an important book for those interested in dance history, women's studies, and regional histories.

A little-known lecture by Lévi-Strauss is the inspiration for this work. In this lecture, he intuitively suggested that in medieval Europe there once existed a set of myths, centred on the grail, which are structurally the opposite of the goatsucker myths that he famously analyzed in his mythologiques series. This work uses Lévi-Strauss' inspirational lecture as a launchpad for an exploration of a group of related medieval Welsh myths, two of which have been briefly considered previously by Lévi-Strauss himself. The root of the methodological approach this book employs throughout is the Structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss; however, it has been modified to incorporate the suggestions of later neo-Structuralists. This analysis tool is applied to a group of myths, which have become conveniently--if somewhat erroneously--known as the Mabinogion. The name Mabinogion appears as part of a colophon at the end of one of the myth of Pwyll and it was later adopted first by Pugh (1835), and then by Lady Charlotte Guest (1838) as a title for their now famous translations of Welsh mythology. Consequently, the title has stuck to describe the material that is contained within their translations and, while it is a somewhat inaccurate way to describe the myths, it has the virtues of being both a succinct and widely recognised signifier. The term has come to signify eight myths, or perhaps more accurately eight groups of myths, which are all present in the late fourteenth-century manuscript Llyfr Coch Hergest (The Red Book of Hergest), and all but one of which can be found in the slightly earlier Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch (The White Book of Rhydderch). As such, the Mabinogion is the key collection of medieval Welsh mythology and an important source for early Arthurian material. Although Structuralism and the Mabinogion have attracted a good deal of attention from the academic world, there has been never been a sustained attempt to follow Levi-Strauss' intuitive insights with a methodical Structuralist analysis of this material. In the year of Lévi-Strauss' centenary celebrations, this work is the first sustained attempt to follow his intuitive suggestions about several Mabinogion myths with a detailed Structuralist analysis of the Mabinogion. This work is therefore a unique anthropological presentation and analysis of the Mabinogion, which argues for a radical, new interpretation of these myths in light of the existence of a central system of interlocking symbols that has the Grail at its heart. Through the analysis, the book reveals a logical organizational principle that underlies a body of material that has previously been viewed as disparate and confusing. This underlying structure is demonstrated to be, as Lévi-Strauss suggested it may, the opposite of that which Lévi-Strauss himself uncovered in the Americas. The revelation of this new form of underlying structure leads to a rethinking of some important aspects of Structuralism, including the Canonical formula, at the same time as acting as a tribute to the farsightedness of Lévi-Strauss. This book makes important contributions to the fields of Arthurian studies, anthropology, Celtic studies, cultural studies, medieval studies, mythology and religious studies.

The Challenge of Change in Africa's Higher Education in the 21st Century brings the reader face to face with the mega challenges and key opportunities in Africa's higher education sector in the twenty-first century. Mwenda and Muuka are two of Africa's emergent scholars, with 20 published books and over 100 articles published in peer-reviewed journals between them as of 2008. Authors who are diverse in their knowledge and experience of the complexities of education in Africa join Mwenda and Muuka in this treatise, which traverses the higher education milieu on the continent from Cape Town in South Africa to Lagos in Nigeria. Stated simply, those who have long called for a new generation of scholars on education in Africa will find a healthy and refreshing answer in The Challenge of Change in Africa's Higher Education in the 21st Century. The motivation for this book was the editors' recognition of gaps in the current understanding of higher education in Africa. The book has clear advantages and defining features over other books on higher education on the continent in the following respects. The Challenge of Change in Africa's Higher Education in the 21st Century is a book written from and with twenty-first century realities, making it a significant addition to the continuing and urgent search for solutions to the continent's development dilemma. It is therefore critical reading and research material for many stakeholders including students, professors, universities, and research libraries on the one hand and higher education ministries in Africa on the other. The role of international development agencies and non-governmental organizations towards enhancement of higher education in Africa cannot be overemphasized.

Using a sociological, historical, and psychological approach, this work offers a multidisciplinary perspective and fills the research gap about the Harlem community and urban black life during the Jazz Age and the Great Depression. This book proposes that Harlem was an intricate domain of competing ideologies, needs, and interests wherein there were many cross-cutting forms of power and exclusion. Such competition placed the community at the intersection of complicated power relations in which local, citywide and nationwide power, policies, and commitments overlapped. Changing economic circumstances that characterized the interwar period combined with the shifting municipal politics including community reliance on government support and the political strength of medical societies that left Harlem residents politically and economically circumscribed in their efforts to build and fortify institutions focused on maintaining community wellness. In this larger circumscription, citywide, statewide, and nationwide politics made health for black people a politicized affair during the early twentieth century. This work further reveals that in conjunction with the political economy of race, health was a major issue of debate that residents of Harlem could enter into despite systematic efforts by politicians and medical professionals to simultaneously limit residents' political agency and regulate health services and institutions in New York City. Such fissures and cracks within the political structure allowed for community engagement and empowerment. This study provides for a more comprehensive understanding of the connections among black morbidity, mortality, health-care delivery, and black political engagement in Harlem, New York, and aims to expand the historical understanding of race and politics, as well as the lived experiences of black people in New York City in the early twentieth century. As a scholarly work in the field of African American urban history, Building a Healthy Black Harlem is accessible to upper-division undergraduate and graduate students in courses in post-1865 United States history, African American history, and urban history. It also possesses the insight and rigor for specialists in the field of New York City history and African American urban history.

Yemen is an arid and mountainous country in the southern corner of the Arabian Peninsula. Yemen is mostly rural, with over half the population below age 15, and more than one-fifth of its 22 million people are malnourished. One of the poorest Arab countries, Yemen's birth and population growth rates are also among the world's highest. With an annual growth rate of 3.4 %, the population could double by 2030. The country's current fertility rate is 6.2. This reflects a high birthrate, 39.2 per 1,000 population, and a declining mortality rate, 11 per 1,000 population. Yemen's infant mortality rate, however, still ranks as one of the highest in the world. This includes a mortality rate of 102 per 1,000 live births for children under 5 years old in 2003. From the late 1980s through the late 1990s, Yemen experienced a high maternal mortality ratio of 351 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. Maternal deaths account for about 42% of all deaths among Yemeni women between the ages of fifteen and forty-nine. Since the unification of Yemen in 1990, several structural reforms and policy changes have been introduced to control its population growth. Although the government recognizes population growth as a major challenge to development, little progress has been made in implementing population policy and societal consensus remains elusive. Thus, the structural context of reproduction in Yemen exposes women to a large number of risks. The disadvantages of poverty and poor health among women are passed on from one generation to the next. Even during the course of reproduction, poor women face several threats to their physical and mental well being. While these disadvantages have been well chronicled in most societies, not much is known about reproductive health in many poor Arab countries. But for a few rich Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, the state of reproductive health among women in poor Arab states has been hardly investigated. Although, more recently, several studies have attempted to document poor reproductive health conditions in this part of the world, a few countries go unnoticed mostly due to the lack of access to national level data. The Republic of Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the Middle East, has for several reasons failed to draw the attention of social science researchers. The authors began a number of studies to learn more about Yemeni women's reproductive health under the conditions of dire social and economic disadvantages caused by extreme poverty. This book is a compilation of the authors' studies on Yemen and attempts to draw conclusions which would not have been possible with a single study. The book examines the reproductive health of women in Yemen. Women's reproductive health has emerged as an area of concern among development agencies and international agencies such as the United Nations. However, theoretical models for examining reproductive health appear to lag behind the massive amount of reproductive health rhetoric in the recent years. Even though there is no uniform definition of reproductive health, we characterize reproductive health by focusing on the three components of fertility: intercourse, conception and gestation. This method directs attention to the context of reproduction in developing countries. In addition, the book reveals the previously underappreciated role of abortion in contributing to the first stages of fertility decline. The study finds that higher economic levels and improved social conditions for women do help bring about real improvements in many dimensions of reproductive health. Women's Reproductive Health in Yemen is an important book for scholars in demography and population health.

A most remarkable change took place in the first half of the twentieth century in China--women journalists became powerful professionals who championed feminist interests, discussed national politics, and commented on current social events by editing independent periodicals. The rise of modern journalism in China provided literate women with a powerful institution that allowed them articulate women's presence in the public space. In editing women's periodicals, women writers transformed themselves from traditional literary women (cainü) to professional women journalists (nübaoren) in the period of 1898-1937 when journalism became increasingly independent of and resistant to state control. The women's media writings in the early decades of the twentieth century not only reveal the historical diversity and complexity of feminist issues in China but also casts light upon important feminist topics that have survived the Nationalist, Communist, and economic reform eras. Today, public debate on women's issues in Mainland China and Taiwan is shaped by past feminist discourse and uses a vocabulary and language familiar to readers of an earlier era. This book examines how women journalists constructed Chinese feminism and debated patriarchy and women's roles in the newly created public space of print media during the period of 1898-1937. It studies Chinese women's public writings in periodicals edited and staffed by women journalists in four major urban centers-Shanghai, Tokyo, Beijing, and Tianjin at a time when urban society underwent major transformation and experienced drastic political, social, and cultural changes. The revolution that overthrew the imperial government in 1911; an attack on patriarchy by cultural radicals in 1915-1919; and the advocacy of nationalism, liberalism, socialism, and feminism by intellectuals who received a Western-style education all worked together to undermine the Confucian notions of gender hierarchy, spatial separation of the sexes, and female domesticity among the well-educated urban classes. Doors of political participation, public activism, and production cracked open for courageous women who ventured into urban public spaces. From 1898 to 1937, urban women of the upper, middle, and working classes became increasingly visible at modern schools, as well as in career and production fields, political activism, and women's movements. At the same time, women edited independent periodicals and championed women's rights. Women's periodicals provided a site where writers negotiated with nationalism, patriarchy, and party lines to define and defend women's interests. These early feminist writings captured how activists perceived themselves and responded to the social and political changes around them. This book takes a historical approach in its examination and uses gender as an analytical category to study the significance of women's press writings in the years of nation building. Treating women journalists as agents of change and using their media writings as primary sources, this book explores what mattered to women writers at different historical junctures, as well as how they articulated values and meaning in a changing society and guided social changes in the direction they desired. It delineates the transformation of women journalists from political-minded Confucian gentry women to professional journalists, and of women's periodicals from representing women journalists' views to addressing the concerns and needs of the majority of women. It analyzes how the concepts of "feminism" and "nationalism" were embodied with different--even contesting--meanings at given historical junctures, and how women journalists managed to advance various feminist agendas by tapping on the various meanings of nationalism. This is an important book for collections in Asian studies, journalism history, and women's studies.

In the past few decades, an apparent international consensus has developed regarding a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. However, in spite of this consensus and the fact that peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians have been ongoing in one way or another for over 17 years, peace has been elusive at best. The frustration and the suffering of the people on both sides of the conflict have led many to believe that the two-state-solution consensus is, in fact, unattainable, and this has fueled the emergence of alternative solutions. On one end of the spectrum, there are those on the Israeli side that advocate the idea of conflict management, instead of conflict resolution. At the other end of the spectrum are those (mostly on the pro-Palestinian side) who champion the proposal of a single, bi-national state. It was in this context that a group of academics from the U.S., Israel, and Palestine, gathered at a conference aptly titled "Pathways to Peace" in March 2008 to explore, discuss, and generate fresh, new ideas to bring forth an academic perspective of peace along with the aim of attaining justice and security for both the peoples of Palestine and Israel. Essays arising from this meeting were written to note down these ideas from some of the most important researchers in this area, such as Professor Herbert Kelman from Harvard University, Professor Naomi Chazan from Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Dr. Sami Adwan from Bethlehem University, as well as other renowned academics from a diverse variety of scholarly backgrounds. This multidisciplinary perspective presents an academic and holistic method of examining and seeking out the elusive resolution to what is one of the longest conflict of the modern era. This edited volume is a collection of essays based on the papers and keynote presentations that were delivered at this conference in a number of different academic disciplines, including political sciences, economics, psychology, philosophy, and literature. It is unique not only in its inclusion of authors from all sides and different political views but also in how it incorporates the various disciplines and theoretical perspectives in proposing and advocating varied solutions to the conflict. This volume makes a substantial contribution to scholarship on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by its application of academic thinking to the solution for one of the most serious conflicts of our time.

Environmental and human security issues are vital national security interests in African states because most citizens are engaged in daily struggles to survive. Chronic and worsening resource scarcities and degradations fuel these individual struggles, along with political conflicts among different groups vying to control and benefit from scarce resources. Thus, many observers agree on the importance of expanding the concept of national security in African states, but there is no consensus yet on the optimal approach for studying or improving environmental and human security problems. While there are books on human and environmental security, few past works focus on Africa or address the interests and concerns of researchers and practitioners working in such diverse fields as development, security, or environmental science. Even though the military is one of the most influential institutions in African countries, no published work to date has addressed issues related to when, how, or if national and foreign militaries should be involved in promoting human and environmental security. African Environmental and Human Security in the 21st Century fills this void by combining ten original studies that discuss important non-traditional security issues facing countries located in each region of Africa. This volume reflects a shared assumption that one must have case-specific knowledge, use multidisciplinary and multi-level conceptual frameworks, and have an appreciation of feasible and desirable public policies in order to understand and effectively address complex non-traditional security concerns. This is the first book to address a broad array of African environmental and human security issues. The book is intended to be used by beginning students, seasoned researchers, novice and experienced practitioners. The case studies expose the reader to past relevant research, while also identifying the main causes and consequences of different types of political conflicts fueled by human and environmental security problems. Each study also contains policy lessons, "best practices", or recommended future actions. The originality and comprehensiveness of each chapter means that the volume is likely to appeal to a wide range of readers for many years. Despite the diversity of the contributors' backgrounds, many of the conclusions and recommendations use common themes about the complex causes of human and environmental conflicts; the need to adopt longer-term time frames to evaluate the effectiveness of policy actions; and an emphasis on the importance of outside actors providing modest amounts of targeted aid to help Africans manger immediate pressing problems as well. Several authors addressed the proper role for outside agencies, such as AFRICOM and USAID, and provide caveats similar to the thrust of Maxie McFarland's cautionary concluding comments at the ISA panel; to wit, just because "the military is already doing a lot of nontraditional, human security type projects in Iraq and Afghanistan ...and just because the Army [and other branches of the military] can do this type of activity, "doesn't mean you want them to do it." African Environmental and Human Security in the 21st Century is an important book for African Studies, economic development, environmental and earth science, environmental security, ecotourism, history, human security, international relations, national security and military Science Collections.

From the days of Athenian democracy to the back rooms of Chicago politics today, corruption has plagued all political systems for all time. It is ubiquitous, vexing, and at times, threatens the very fabric of society. No culture, no system of government, no code of ethics has been able to eliminate political corruption. While the United States generally ranks comparatively low in measures of political corruption (Transparency International rates the U.S. as the 18th "least" corrupt nation in the world, with Denmark at number one, New Zealand, second, and Sweden third, the U.K. 16, France 23, Spain 28, Israel 33, South Korea 40, Italy 55, Cuba 65, with Somalia last at 180), yet it too continues to confront the sting of political corruption. For something to count as political corruption in the United States, it must have a public impact, be a part of some violation of public trust. As such, another useful distinction can be drawn between individual corruption and systemic corruption. The former is individual wrongdoing. An officeholder on the take, a legislator who sells his vote, would be examples of "bad apples." Systemic corruption encompasses a broader sphere. Instead of bad apples, here you have a "bad system." The undermining of democratic legitimacy or equality might be considered examples of systemic corruption, as might campaign financing practices. Such corruption runs deeper than mere individual transgression. Corruption is embedded into the day-to-day operation of the system. In focusing on the individual, we often overlook the systemic. It is easier, and in the short run, more gratifying to catch, punish, and condemn an individual like Governor Blagojevich. Yet what of the systemic forces that led the governor to behave in such a manner? Is there undue systemic pressure to accumulate money, so much so that the system pushes politicians "over the edge"? A politician need not "sell" offices to enter into a Faustian bargain. It may be perfectly legal to collect campaign contributions, yet it may also have a corrosive or corrupting effect on the integrity of the democratic process. With so many issues of corruption swirling around in the current American political climate, it is timely that there is new scholarship that casts much-needed light on these systemic forces. The brilliant discussions by a stellar list of distinguished scholars, led by Michael A. Genovese and Victoria A. Farrar-Meyers, in the insightful edited volume, Corruption and American Politics, delivers the best and most up-to-date thinking by some of the finest political minds in the nation. This will be an essential resource for all collections in political science and American studies.

"This book offers a new way of understanding how neighborhood revitalization can be done in a way that benefits both residents and the economy. Sandoval pioneers the use of complexity thinking as a lens to see what would otherwise be invisible-the co-evolution of a community with the city's actions and policies. He does this through a vivid case study of the process by which remarkable positive change took place in a once troubled, poor neighborhood in Central Los Angeles." -Judith Innes, Professor of City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley, and author of Planning with Complexity: Introduction to Collaborative Rationality for Public Policy "Sandoval illuminates the variations in the way city hall people and neighborhood people deal with one another. Much as they may want to support neighborhood organizations, his study reveals that city hall people are often unclear on how to do it. We need a theory of city hall-neighborhood interaction; maybe we have now found it in Los Angeles." -Pierre Clavel, Professor of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University

This book, which emerged from conversation at the Institute of Conflict Research in Vienna, contains twelve carefully researched and well-written essays on the timely topic of the problem of prejudice. The contributors were chosen for their scholarly expertise in their particular fields. Taken together they provide an interdisciplinary approach, each casting light from a different angle on the problem of prejudice. The book is divided into two parts. Part one explores six particular manifestations of prejudice: anti-semitism; sexism and heterosexism; prejudice against the sick, old, and handicapped; religious prejudice; racism; and social class prejudice. Part Two further illuminates these prejudices by focusing upon them through six theoretical lenses: history and art history; social functionalism; social psychology; bioscience; law; and contemporary language behavior. The final thirteenth chapter summarizes the book's findings. This book has been introduced by essays setting this work in context and carefully defining the meaning of the word "prejudice." This handbook presents a valuable set of insights, explanations, and theories, which can be used to develop a set of "best practices". Academic by nature, this handbook will enable those who are interested in an educational agenda to find the necessary analytical tools. This book will be an essential addition for all collections in sociology and especially for scholars interested in anti-Semitism, sexism, heterosexism, disability studies, geriatrics studies; religious studies, history, art history, psychology, bioscience, law, and contemporary language behavior.

More than a century ago, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville remarked that Islam was not compatible with democracy and that conflicts between Islamic nations and the West were therefore inevitable. Although this viewpoint is not shared by all, it has some influence among scholars. The 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center Tower in New York City intensified the debate. With the rapid economic developments in Asia in recent decades, another important topic of debate has increasingly attracted people's attention: the compatibility of the so-called "Asian values" (ones that value family ties and strong government) with democratic ideals that value individualism and weak government. The debate has become even more intense with the combination of Islamic and Asian values regarding democratization. Asia is home to many Muslims, including Indonesia, the most populous Islam country in the world. Is Islam compatible with democratization in the context of Asian cultures? This is the central question that this collection of essays seeks to answer. To address these important issues, a series of books have been published in the English language. Most of these books deal with the relationship between Islam, Muslims, and democratization with a sub-region in Asia, such as Islam and democracy in central Asia, Islam, and Muslims in south Asia, as well as Islam and democracy in Southeast Asia. Some deal with the same issue with a focus on the future. However, there has yet to be a book that deals with the relationship between Islam, Muslims, and democratization in the context of Asian cultures from the perspectives of theory and empirical country studies in South, Southeast, and Central Asia. This volume seeks to help fill the gap. Although most contributors in this collection are affiliated with scholarly institutions in North America and Europe, most of them have their ethnic origins in Asia. Contributors in this collection include not only scholars but also practitioners, such as diplomats. The voices of this diverse group thus represent a variety of viewpoints, spanning from those who believe that Islam is compatible with democracy to those who have doubts about it. The first three chapters by Muqtedar Khan, Moataz A. Fattah, and Laure Paquette discuss the theoretical issues of Islam in the context of Asian cultures. Issues addressed include the relationship between Islamic governance and democracy, the Muslim political culture, and the underdog strategy adopted by some Islamic countries in Asia. These theoretical studies are followed by three chapters by Touqir Hussain, Tariq Karim, and Omar Khalidi, who comment on South Asia. They discuss topics that include the relations between Islam and democracy in the context of Pakistan, the aspiring pluralist democracy and expanding political Islam in Bangladesh, and the Muslim experience of Indian democracy. This is then followed by a section on Southeast Asia where Felix Heiduk discusses the role of political Islam in post-Suharto Indonesia in one chapter and Naveed S. Sheikh comments on the ambiguities of Islamic(ate) politics in Malaysia in another chapter. The last two chapters are on Central Asia. Brian Glyn Williams provides unprecedented insight about the Taliban and Al Qaeda suicide bombers with an account of his field trip to Afghanistan, and Morris Rossabi discusses Muslim and democracy in the context of China and Central Asia. This volume, comprising the perspectives of scholars and practitioners, will be invaluable to those in political science, sociology, and religious studies.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, over ninety-five percent of all the productive land in Ireland was in the hands of Anglo-Irish landowners. They lived in the 'big houses', some of which still exist today, resplendent within their walled estates. Many others are now only gaunt ruins silhouetted against somber Irish skies, victims of 'the troubles' in the 1920s. There is a continuing fascination with the history of the big house in Ireland. Much of this interest stems from the Anglo-Irish living in places apart, in their estates, often in remote areas of an undeveloped and hostile land. Part of the appeal is in the characters, neither wholly English nor Irish, who made up this landowning class in Ireland. However, another part, largely ignored until this study, is how many of these landowners not only met these challenges but achieved remarkable levels of self-sufficiency. It was their exploitation of technology that hugely bolstered their status and independence and enabled them to lead an exotic lifestyle in Ireland. Although much has been written regarding the social and political history of the Anglo-Irish in Ireland, little research has been conducted into the practical problems of living there. At a time when there were few roads, no railways, and sailing ships were the unreliable connection with England, existence might have been very basic indeed. Charles Carson uncovers and explains in simple terms the technologies employed, to not only make life bearable, but in some case to become a triumph over seemingly impossible odds. An appreciation of this background helps to explain the sense of status and independence that emanates from the big house in Ireland until their demise in the late twentieth century. Interdisciplinary investigative methods were used in this work. These included extensive archival research of estate papers throughout Ireland; fieldwork involving examination and photography of still-extant big house technology; and the use of published fictional and biographical big house material. Much additional insight, and suggestions for further research, resulted from visits to various big house locations. Owners, often descendants of the original families, or managers and ground staff, provided important local knowledge. Climbing amongst stored artefacts in cellars, barns, and subterranean tunnels helped to bring the past alive. Something of the ambiance of these explorations informs this book, thus helping towards an understanding of the fundamental importance of technology in underpinning the status and independence of the big house in Ireland. By examining the range, costs, and changing nature of the technologies employed, this book makes an important contribution to a deeper understanding of life in the big house in Ireland circa 1800 to circa 1930. Brief descriptions, accompanied by drawings or photographs, are employed to explain the operation, limitations, and improvements of many of the installations and techniques. These include water closets, pumps, cisterns, boilers, and firefighting equipment; open fires, hot air stoves, and central heating; walled gardens, hot walls and beds, warm air, steam, and hot water heating of glasshouses; the construction, location, stocking, and use of ice houses and ice; daylight enhancement, candle, oil, gas, and electric lighting; an optical telegraph, a church spire, engine driven equipment on the estate farm as well as mapping of bogs and their reclamation by wooden railways. Technology and the Big House in Ireland, c. 1800-c. 1930 is an important reference source for Irish study groups worldwide.

The colonialist West has spoken for New Mexico since 1540 when Francisco Vasquez de Coronado traveled to Acoma Pueblo in his search for the legendary cities of gold. With the Spanish incursion, followed fifty-six years later by the first English-speaking colonists in New Mexico, began the representation of New Mexico from an outsider's perspective. The colonial West imagined itself to hold central claims to knowledge, so it knew its peripheries only as it encountered and articulated their presence to itself. This Western narrative, based on an imagined Western privilege to foundational or platonic knowledge, has become the dominant Euro-American discourse through which New Mexico has come to be known. The comparative study of this collection of travel and contact narratives traces the enforcement of--and resistance to--the Western myth of the Euro-American and European as normative, as well as the Hispanic and the native as Other. The author ably introduces the platonic quest as a new unifying thread that links each of these travel narratives to his argument that identity and claims to knowledge may be tested, recovered, or created in movement within New Mexico. The platonic journey has mostly been understood as an intellectual journey toward truth. This study expands upon the platonic journey to show that it may also, like the quest, be played out in geographical space. Travel Narratives from New Mexico will be a very valuable resource for students and scholars of literature, especially of the American Southwest and travel theory.

Over the past 30 years, much has been written about the direct relationship between board composition and firm performance. However, the final results of the quest for empirical proof to measure the impact of this relationship are inconclusive. This is partly due to differences in operationalizing board composition and also partly due to the fact that various definitions of the term performance are used, including financial performance, firm performance, and market performance. More fundamentally, however, it is because a firm's performance, no matter how narrowly this word is defined, is the end result of a large number of factors, of which board composition is only one. More meaningful, therefore, is the study of the various ways to improve board performance. Effective boards are those in which the strengths and expertise of the members match the needs of the organization at any given time. Therefore, in today's fast-changing environment, the present research suggests a need for a proactive management of the board composition in anticipation of major external/internal organizational changes as well as during the various phases of a firm's life cycle. The theoretical review of the extant research on board role and composition that is covered in this book is comprehensive not only in terms of the use of major theories relevant to corporate governance but also in terms of the analysis of business scenarios that could affect the role and composition of the board throughout an organization's life cycle. This research, which was undertaken over many years, delivers valuable insights on directors' motivations to join a board and on the meaning of two key directors' selection criteria (i.e., required board experience and independence). When the pool of candidates is limited, more competence and more independence become contradictory objectives, and this dilemma has not been adequately addressed by policy makers. The board of directors represents a core component of the corporate governance system in the western economies. Anyone interested in corporate governance and research in this field would benefit from the theoretical framework developed in this book. Qualitative researchers would also be interested in the methodology used during the fieldwork. Senior executives and board members represent a notoriously challenging population to observe and interview.

This study adopts a political perspective and is grounded in the assumption that special education is a policy domain characterized by multiple and competing interests. The interest groups studied operate in a political, multi-institutional policy environment and employ targeted strategies to further specific policy goals. Special education as a national policy is the sum of incremental policy making across multiple institutions. The multiple access points to the policymaking system afford institutions the ability to create and interpret policy across time and contexts. As a result, special education policy is defined by federal law, corresponding state laws, regulations, judicial interpretations, and local implementation. This research focuses specifically how advocacy groups "package" their interests to policy makers, strategies they choose, and their overall effectiveness. This study is the first that analyzes special education interest groups' behavior and effectiveness over a 30-year time span, using advocacy groups as units of analysis. The study also increases our knowledge about the political participation of parents of children with disabilities, who have a deep personal investment in the policy outcomes and who behave differently from groups that represent professionals. Finally, the study's longitudinal focus on advocacy organizations from the initial passage of the federal special education statute in 1975 through its reauthorizations contributes to the knowledge of interest group interactions over time. This is an important book for readers with a specific interest in special education policy and political scientists who are more generally interested in the broader questions of public policy making. The book is also of interest to practitioners in the fields of special education and public policy.