Books published by Lexington Books

The UN outlawed genocide in 1948, and the United States launched a war on terror in 2001; yet still today, neither genocide nor terrorism shows any sign of abating. This book explains why those efforts have fallen short and identifies policies that can prevent such carnage. The key is getting the causation analysis right. Conventional wisdom emphasizes ancient hatreds, poverty, and the impact of Western colonialism as drivers of mass violence. But far more important is the inciting power of mass, ideological hate propaganda: this is what activates the drive to commit mass atrocities, and creates the multitude of perpetrators needed to conduct a genocide or sustain a terror campaign. A secondary causal factor is illiberal, dualistic political culture: this is the breeding ground for the extremist, ';us-vs-them' ideologies that always precipitate episodes of mass hate incitement. A two-tiered policy response naturally follows from this analysis: in the short term, several targeted interventions to curtail outbreaks of such incitement; and in the long term, support for indigenous agents of liberalization in venues most at risk for ideologically-driven violence.

This interdisciplinary investigation argues that since the 1990s, discourses about mixed-race heritage in the United States have taken the shape of a veritable literary genre, here termed ';memoir of the search.' The study uses four different texts to explore this non-fictional genre, including Edward Balls Slaves in the Family and Shirlee Taylor Haizlips The Sweeter the Juice. All feature a protagonist using methods from archival investigation to DNA-testing to explore an intergenerational family secret; photographs and family trees; and the trip to the American South, which is identified as the site of the secret's origin and of the family's past. As a genre, these texts negotiate the memory of slavery and segregation in the present.In taking up central narratives of Americanness, such as the American Dream and the Immigrant story, as well as discourses generating the American family, the texts help inscribe themselves and the mixed-race heritage they address into the American mainstream. In its outlook, this book highlights the importance of the memoirs' negotiations of the past when finding ways to remember after the last witnesses have passed away. and contributes to the discussion over political justice and reparations for slavery.

Non-state actors are not new, but they have never before reached their present strength. Among the plethora of non-state actors are thousands, if not millions, of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) which play a significant role in the global system and whose role is likely to increase in the future. The proliferation of NGOs is of such scale, scholars refer to it as a global associational revolution. By considering NGOs throughout much of the world, Kaloudis focuses on the reasons for the growth of NGOs particularly since the end of the Cold War, the functions of NGOs, assessment of NGOs, and their place in the global system. The author also shows the ambivalent and often paradoxical role of NGOs, which is reflected in the works of scholars and the actual behavior of NGOs themselves.

Mono no Aware and Gender as Affect in Japanese Aesthetics and American Pragmatism argues that gender is best understood as a felt sense of the organization of the human body. Through Japanese aesthetics and American pragmatism, this book argues that re-understanding gender as an affect, or a feeling, can expand the ways that gender is understood, enacted, and theorized in experience.

The worldwide outcry from protesters of the 2017 Women's March made clear the connections of many related issues and the powerful connection to ecofeminism. Pink Hats and Ballots: An Ecofeminist Analysis of Women's Political Activism in the Age of Trump, Coronavirus, and Black Lives Matter provides an enlightening combination of history, federal policy changes, social science research, and ecofeminism to explain the extraordinary rise of women's political activism and the continued empowerment of minoritized individuals to resist oppression and engage in heightened new levels of political involvement. Environmental justice, racism, and social justice are central in analyzing the events encapsulating American politics between the 2016 and the 2020 Presidential elections culminating in the massive participation in 2020's Black Lives Matter protests during the COVID-19 pandemic. This book is vital reading for those new to activism and explains the connections between current issues and the exploitation of the environment.

Young people who have received special education services in the United States are vastly overrepresented in juvenile and adult criminal justice systems relative to their numbers in the general population. Although much existing research blames individual kids for getting arrested, school-level policies and practices affect a variety of student outcomes, including involvement with the justice system. These school-level policies and practices canand shouldbe altered by teachers, administrators, and policy makers to reduce the number of young people getting arrested. Disabling the School-to-Prison Pipeline uses administrative data from New York City public schools and interviews with young people who have received special education services in NYC public schools and been arrested to better understand how schools can help or harm students receiving special education services. Schools cannot fix all problems associated with the criminal justice system in the United States; however, we can certainly expect schools not to make existing problems worse. This book identifies school-level policies and practices that may lead to negative outcomes for students, such as getting arrested, and suggests alternatives.

Understanding Green Card Marriage Fraud explores the experiences of people who participated in Green Card marriage fraud, providing firsthand accounts of the social, individual and legal factors associated with this crime. This book uncovers deficient immigration procedures and offers insightful ways to improve upon them.

Literary Slumming: Slang and Class in Nineteenth-Century France applies a sociolinguistic approach to the representation of slang in French literature and dictionaries to reveal the ways in which upper-class writers, lexicographers, literary critics, and bourgeois readers participated in a sociolinguistic concept the author refers to as ';literary slumming', or the appropriation of lower-class and criminal language and culture. Through an analysis of spoken and embodied manifestations of the anti-language of slang in the works of Eugene Franois Vidocq, Honore de Balzac, Eugene Sue, Victor Hugo, the Goncourt Brothers, and mile Zola, Literary Slumming argues that the nineteenth-century French literary discourse on slang led to the emergence of this sociolinguistic phenomenon that prioritized lower-class and criminal life and culture in a way that ultimately expanded class boundaries and increased visibility and agency for minorities within the public sphere.

Exploring Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality in Four Spanish Plays explores society's influence on identity in Spanish theatrical works and discusses parallels to these works in contemporary popular culture. The Spanish plays El retablo de las maravillas (The Marvelous Puppet Show) by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1615); Virtudes vencen seales (Virtues Overcome Signs) by Velez de Guevara (1620); El pblico (The Audience) by Federico Garca Lorca (1929;, and La llamada de Lauren (Lauren's Call) by Paloma Pedrero (1985) all deal with characters in the midst of a crisis of identity. Using an eclectic approach, supported by contemporary theories of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, Beth Bernstein analyzes the four plays in terms of identity and shows how society imposes the construction of identity. As the characters reach to define themselves, internal and external pressures guide them in interpreting acceptable behavior. This book offers a close reading of the psychological struggle of the characters, driven by society to cover their differences with a symbolic mask which, if donned, will eventually devour their true identity.

Gramsci and Media Literacy: Critically Thinking about TV and the Movies offers a series of contemporary media analyses that use Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony to explore how dominant ideologies in media delivery, historical storytelling, and gender in today's mass media environment become the commonsense viewpoints that maintain power structures in civil society. Through a media literacy approach, case studies of ideological delivery through television and film illustrate why Gramscian media theory serves as a valuable tool for revealing the many ways hegemonic thought operates in the media sphere and in everyday life, and they offer hope for counterhegemonic understandings.

The contemporary idea of the ';work of art' is paradoxically both widely used and often unexamined. Therefore, we must re-evaluate the concept before we can understand what the deconstruction of aesthetics means for thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. By examining their analyses of works of visual art and contextualizing their thinking on the matter, Martta Heikkil asserts that the implications of the ';work of art,' ';art,' and ';the aesthetic' apply not only to philosophical questions but also to a broader area. Instead of the totality represented by the historical concept of Art, poststructuralist thinkers introduce the idea of the radical multiplicity of art and its works. From this notion arises the fundamental issue in Derrida and the poststructuralist tradition: how can we speak philosophically of art, which always exists as singular instances, as works? In Deconstruction and the Work of Art: Visual Arts and Their Critique in Contemporary French Thought, Heikkil shows that the deconstructionist notions of art are still influential in the discourses of contemporary art, in which artworks proliferate and the concept of ';work' is open-ended and expanding. This book offers an introduction to the deconstructionist theory of art and brings new perspectives to the complex, undecidable relation between philosophy and art.

In Literacy Experiences of Formerly Incarcerated Women: Sentences and Sponsors, Melanie N. Burdick uses narrative research to elucidate the literacy experiences of formerly incarcerated women and how literacy has affected their lives, both while incarcerated and while transitioning back into society. Using Deborah Brandt's theory of literacy sponsorship (1998), Burdick explores both the mass incarceration of women and their access to literacy as feminist and social justice issues. While reading and writing in prison is often romanticized through caricatures of incarcerated people who become enlightened and reformed, Burdick targets these romanticized views and criticizes their controlling and harmful effects. This book shines a light on the personal and political ramifications of literacy experiences in women's lives as they grow up in families and schools, move through the prison system, and transition back into society and higher education, arguing that literacy is politically situated and that transitioning out of prison is a complex process marked by literate acts that are dependent upon constructive literacy sponsorship.

This book argues that Africa should shift its development paradigm to pursue a model of regional corporation that brings integration and development objectives together. This would move Africa up global production value chains with the beneficiation and transformation of its minerals and the diversification of its economies.

Veronika Groke interrogates the concept of the comunidad indigena (indigenous community) and the role it plays within contemporary Bolivian discourse by examining its relation to the history and social life of a Guarani community in Bolivia.

The New Cinematic Weird argues that weird fiction is rising also in audiovisual culture. Presenting several detailed analyses of weird cinematic works, the book shows how the new cinematic weird is best understood as atmospheric worldings affective intensities that suffuse the experience of the cinematic weird. The weird exists as an experiential field, an inflation of the world. These worldings disclose a variety of experiences. The book engagingly shows how creepy, unsettling, ominous, uneasy, and eerie atmospheres provide a way into the weird experience. This book is important to anyone interested in the audiovisual weird, cinematic atmospheres, how audiovisual media produce worlds, and how weird fiction challenges our conception of the way the world is.

Police Related Deaths in the United States examines how police related deaths in the US occur; how investigations are conducted into these deaths; and why such deaths and the investigatory processes into them provoke such concern in the wider American society. The book considers such deaths as being the result of structural and systemic factors in policing, the criminal justice system, and broader socio-political and socio-legal landscapes in the U.S.. It argues that an increasingly aggressive police mindset allied with relatively toothless regulatory frameworks effectively lead to police being enabled by the criminal justice system to use lethal force with relative impunity. The book considers the disproportionate number of deaths in marginalized communities, for example: people of color, people who are mentally unwell, and LGBTQ people. Each chapter in the book begins with a case study of a specific police related death and places issues within that case in the wider context of policing in the US. David Baker argues that the effects of these deaths go beyond merely policing and criminal justice, and corrodes the core fabric of American society.

The American Dream for Students of Color examines how the American Dream informs beliefs about talent, hard work, and perseverance rather than dismantling barriers to educational success for marginal students. Using narrative methodologies, connections between the authors narratives and those of school youth and educators are explored.

The popular protests in early 2011 were once seen as a turning point in the history of the Arab world, raising hopes for democracy, freedom, and justice in the Middle East. A decade after the uprisings, these hopes are largely dashed in each country swept by popular protests with the exception of Tunisia. Tunisia became the only democracy in the entire region while Egypt saw its first freely elected president and government thrown out by the army in a bloody coup which resulted in a regime that is no less authoritarian than Mubarak's. This book provides a detailed analysis of the political, economic, and constitutional developments in Tunisia and Egypt. In the light of the existing literature on comparative democratization, the author explores why Egypt's path to democratization was eroded by several transitional actors while Tunisian political elite managed to move the country towards democracy. The book centers its focus on the role of the political agents in designing the transition and explores the transitional period with respect to the interactions among the political elite and their cost-benefit assumptions, ideological interests, as well as their commitment to democratic processes.

Parasocial Romantic Relationships: Falling in Love with Media Figures explores how, why, and to what effect individuals develop romantic feelings toward people they ';know' from the media. These imaginary, one-sided relationships, dubbed parasocial romantic relationships, are both profound and pervasive, Riva Tukachinsky Forster argues. These relationships can take many forms, including adolescents who develop celebrity crushes on popular music artist, anime enthusiasts who ';marry' their favorite characters, and fanfiction authors who insert themselves into narratives as romantic interests of the protagonist. Through analysis of surveys, in-depth interviews, and historical examples, this book advances our understanding of parasocial romantic relationships on both a sociocultural and a psychological level. The data and theories analyzed offer insights into how individuals can become romantically engaged with people they do not actually know, some of whom may not even exist in reality. Ultimately, Tukachinsky Forster argues that although these relationships exist only in the mind of consumers, they serve important psychological functions across different stages of life and can lead to significant consequences for individuals' nonmediated relationships. Scholars of media studies, communication, psychology, and sociology will find this book particularly useful.

This book interrogates the relations between nostalgias of today and past utopias in the context of the space age of the 20th century and its cinematic representations in the USSR and in post-Soviet Russia. Once an enthusiastic projection, then a promising and uncanny present, and eventually an assemblage of nostalgic signifiers, in the history of world cinema, this space age has been linked primarily to the genre of science fiction. Here, aspects of the space age such as humanity's imminent expansion to space, interplanetary travel, contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, and intergalactic governance and economy were both celebrated and critically interrogated as cosmopolitan ideals and nation-branding strategies. This book presents the contemporary relevance of this genre as heritage and legacy, archive and canon, and a nest of forgotten ideals and warnings, as well as nostalgic anchoring points. The author analyzes over 30 Soviet science fiction films, foregrounding their structures of utopia and their evolution over time, in order to trace both their transnational positionalities, transmedial resonance, and impact on post-Soviet Russian films about the space age. Concepts, crucial to the understanding of space futures of the past, such as utopianism, otherness, liminality, and no(w)stalgia are activated to draw out the fictional tenants of the memory of the Soviet space age, and to establish the limits and potentialities of Soviet (exra)terraformative ambitions.

This book examines the drama of the eleventh century papal reform movement and the contest between papacy and empire through the life and career of Bishop Bonizo of Sutri (ca. 1045-ca. 1094). This author reveals that the populist roots of this ardent reformer's religious vision, including his vision of holy war.

The time period of 1990-2010 marks a significant moment in Spanish literary publishing that emphasized a new focus on Africa and African voices and signaled the beginning of a publishing boom of Hispano-African authors and themes. Africa in the Contemporary Spanish Novel, 1990-2010 analyzes the strategies that Spanish and Hispano-African authors employ when writing about Africa in the contemporary Spanish novel. Focusing on the former Spanish colonial territories of Morocco, Western Sahara, and Equatorial Guinea, Mahan L. Ellison analyzes the post-colonial literary discourse about these regions at the turn of the twenty-first century. He examines the new ways of conceptualizing Africa that depart from an Orientalist framework as advanced by novelists such as Lorenzo Silva, Concha Lopez Sarasa, Ramon Mayrata, and others. Throughout, Ellison also places the novels within their historical context, specifically engaging with the theoretical ideas of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), to determine to what extent his analysis of Orientalist discourse still holds value for a study of the Spanish novel of thirty years later.

This book provides an overview of key concepts and issues in global politics.