Books published by Lexington Books

Sacred Body analyzes exemplary Jewish texts, narratives, and cultural practices that show how these artifacts unhinge the "sacred" from the divine and focus instead on the "everyday sacred," earthly existence in order to celebrate life-affirming decisions, actions, and relationships, and avoid abstraction, metaphysics, and apocalypticism.

A 2023 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic TitleThis book addresses the ways in which Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë took advantage of the rapid change of their time unleashed by the Industrial Revolution in order to illustrate the inequalities women faced in the Victorian Age. It historically contextualizes all seven novels, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Shirley, Villette, and The Professor, in order to investigate the themes of marriage, education, class, and work. Specifically, the author examines the ways the Brontë sisters decenter marriage, call for equality in education, expose the inherent dignity of humans despite class differences, and demonstrate the ways in which increased work opportunities empowered women. Ultimately, the author argues that the Brontë sisters' call for female empowerment was symptomatic of the age, and one that is realized in the latter half of the Victorian Age and beyond.

This book examines the intersection of music and temporality in British literature of the long nineteenth century, arguing the temporal multiplicity of music as the most dynamic way to subvert mimetic bias. Temporally vexed sound spaces rupture the narrative, transgressing the hegemonic structures to which it is subject.

Textual criticism is vital to scholars of ancient sacred texts, whether they are studying the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Qur'an, or the scriptures of Hinduism, Buddhism, or Taoism. This book compares and contrasts the methodologies in different subfields and proposes a common ground for future textual scholarship.

This book explores the ways in which Butler's protagonists experience Rites of Passage and are on a quest for justice. The author posits that through liminality, they engage in psychological, physical, and social transformations that increase their empowerment.

Non-Western Colonization, Orientalism, and the Comfort Women: The Collective Memory of Sexual Slavery under the Japanese Imperial Military examines the collective memory of sexual slavery under the Japanese Imperial Military in Japan over the past seventy-five years. Euphemistically known as the comfort women, tens of thousands of young females were forced into sexual servitude for Japanese soldiers during the Asia-Pacific War. The majority of these women are believed to have been deceitfully or forcibly taken from Korea, a former Japanese colony. The ways in which sexual slavery has been remembered in Japan lies at the root of a long-standing diplomatic conflict between Japan and South Korea and has fueled a memory war among Japanese scholars and activists. The author argues that Korean comfort women have been exoticized in the collective memory similarly to Oriental womens presentations by Western Orientalists. This book is a comprehensive analysis of the memory of sexual slavery in Japan, examining various artifacts produced since the end of the Asia-Pacific War, including nonfiction books, novels, newspaper articles, popular and documentary films, and a commemorative museum. It provides novel insights into a decade old international and domestic controversy.

Race Unequals: Overseer Contracts, White Masculinities, and the Formation of Managerial Identity in the Plantation Economy is a re-imagining of the plantation not as Black and White, but in shades of White male identity. Through an examination of employment contracts between plantation owners and their overseers, and the web of public and private law that surrounded them, this book challenges notions of a monolithic White male identity in the antebellum South. It considers how race provided White men access to the land and enslaved labor that were foundational to the plantation economy, but how the wealthiest of those men used contracts, public law, and plantation management schemes to limit the access points by which overseers, the first managerial class in the United States, could achieve upward mobility as both White people and as men. In navigating the legal and social parameters of their employment contracts, overseers negotiated a white masculinity that formed their managerial identity. This managerial identity carried the imprint of white supremacy necessary to preserve inequities on the plantation, and perhaps in our modern workplaces as well.

In Seeing Like a Commons, Joshua Lockyer demonstrates how a growing group of people have, over the last eighty years, deliberately built Celo Community, a communal settlement on 1,200 acres of commonly owned land in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. Joshua Lockyer highlights the potential for intentional communities like Celo to raise awareness of global interconnectivity and structural inequalities, enabling people and communities to become better stewards and citizens of both local landscapes and global commons.

In Twenty-First Century Workplace Challenges, Edna Rabenu examines current and future challenges to psychological relationships in the workplace due to shifting environmental conditions such as mass migration, globalization, the advent of cyber entities, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Rabenu's incisive analysis offers new solutions for employees, workers, managers, and organizations.

James Wilson's life began as an Atlantic World success story, with mounting intellectual, political, and legal triumphs, but ended as a Greek tragedy. Each achievement brought greater anxiety about his place in the revolutionary world. James Wilsons life story is a testament to the success that tens of thousands of Scottish immigrants achieved after their trans-Atlantic voyage, but it also reminds us that not all had a happy ending. This book provides a more nuanced and complete picture of James Wilson's contributions in American history. His contributions were far greater than just the attention paid to his legal lectures. His is a very human story of a Scottish immigrant who experienced success and acclaim for his activities on behalf of the American people during his public service, but in his personal affairs, and particularly financial life, he suffered the great heights and deep lows worthy of a Greek tragedy. James Wilsons life is an entry point into the events of the latter half of the 18th century and the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment on American society, discourse, and government.

Discussion of the histories, meanings, and assumptions of restorative justice have enriched the development of its theory, research, and practices. While some of this work has addressed the role of communication, the treatment of communication within restorative justice remains rather under-developed. Communication plays a central role in processes of restoration and justice and a constitutive role in making restorative justice what it is. In Creating Restorative Justice: A Communication Perspective of Justice, Restoration, and Community, Gregory D. Paul and Ian M. Borton argue that by centering communication in restorative justice as it occurs in various contexts (from families, to schools, to communities), we can simultaneously deepen our understanding, enrich our practice, and amplify our study of restoration and justice. From a communication perspective, restorative contexts both use and are created by the communication present. Any outcomes from restorative processes are thus the product of the communication both within and between restorative practices' participants. As the world addresses the challenges presented by injustice, inequality, and insecurity, it is incumbent we expand our understanding of restorative processes to account for the vital role of communication.

This book places early modern philosophy and political theory into conversation with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing on magic: plays, spell books, treatises, and witch trial narratives. Reading works by Hobbes and Bacon alongside writing by necromancers and witch-hunters reveals a broad cultural obsession with supernatural power.

Black Rodeo in the Texas Gulf Coast Region: Charcoal in the Ashes provides an in depth sociocultural and historical analysis of the genesis and contemporary state of affairs regarding African American rodeo cowboys in southeast Texas, whose ancestors were instrumental in the development of the most celebrated livestock management industry in the world. The author painstakingly chronicles the origin of the Texas cattle industry from its Mexican roots to Austin's Colony, better known as the George Plantation/Ranch, where African Americans were intimately involved in the livestock management industry since its inception. Although enslaved before, during, and after the Republic of Texas was established, they were early stakeholders in the expansion of the western frontier, and an indispensable source of labor that facilitated the burgeoning cattle industry. Yet, as the author maintains, American history wantonly trivialized, marginalized, and blatantly omitted their contributions. This book sheds light on these early cowboys and their descendants who have participated in America's most prominent prole sport with little to no media exposure. The author dubbed them ';Shadow Riders of the Subterranean Circuit,' and even though American sports are integrated African American rodeo cowboys may be metaphorically seen as bits of charcoal spread among ashes.

This multidisciplinary book brings the topics of rights, identity, and race together to examine what it means to be oppressed, how oppression works, and what we both as individuals and as a community can do about it, using the Iranian American community as a case study.

In Centering Epistemic Injustice: Epistemic Labor, Willful Ignorance, and Knowing Across Hermeneutical Divides, Kamili Posey asks what it means for accounts of epistemic injustice to take seriously the lives and perspectives of socially marginalized knowers. The first part of this book takes up the predominant account of testimonial injustice offered by Miranda Fricker, arguing that testimonial injustice is not merely about the epistemic harms perpetrated by dominant knowers against marginalized knowers, but also about the strategies that marginalized knowers use to circumvent those harms. Such strategies expand current conceptions of epistemic injustice by centering how marginalized knowers engage and resist in hostile epistemic environments. The second part of the book examines Fricker's concept of hermeneutical injustice, rooted in hermeneutical marginalization. Thinking alongside critics of hermeneutical injustice, Centering Epistemic Injustice explores the relationship between dominant knowing and marginalized knowing and asks if social powerincluding the power to shape collective resources and ways of meaning-makingmakes it impossible for dominant knowers to know and ';hear well' across hermeneutical divides. Finally, the book asks whether hermeneutical divides are real divides in understanding and how dominant knowers might come to be better knowers in the pursuit of a more thoroughgoing epistemic justice.

In this book, Xianghong Feng focuses on the intersection of tourism, power, and inequality in the southern interior of China. In this region, capital-intensive and elite-directed tourism has disrupted the social and cultural patterns of the ethnic Miao and other local residents.

In The Buddha Was a Psychologist: A Rational Approach to Buddhist Teachings, Arnold Kozak argues for a secular and psychological interpretation of the Buddha's wisdom, with a particular focus on his mind model and use of metaphor. Kozak closely examines the Buddha's hagiography, analyzing Buddhist dharma through the contexts of neuroscience, cognitive linguistics, and evolutionary psychology.

Afro-Latinos in the U.S. Economy outlines the current position and status of Afro-Latinxs in the economy of the United States. Very little research has thus far been disseminated in the field of economics on the contributions of Afro-Latinxs regarding income and wealth, labor market status, occupational mobility, and educational attainment. On the other hand, cultural studies, literary criticism, and social science fields have produced more research on Afro-Latinxs; the discipline of economics is, thus, significantly behind the curve in exploring the economic dimensions of this group. While the Afro-Latinx community constitutes a comparatively small segment of the U.S. population, and is often viewed as the nexus between two of the country's largest minority groupsAfrican Americans and Latinxs, who comprise 13 percent and 17 percent, respectively, of the U.S. populationHolder and Aja outline how the group's unique economic position is different than non-black Latinxs. Despite possessing higher levels of education relative to the Latinx community as a whole, U.S. Afro-Latinxs do not experience expected returns in income and earnings, underscoring the role anti-Blackness plays in everyday life regardless of ancestral origin. The goal of this book is to provide a foundation in the economic dimensions of Afro-Latinxs in the U.S. which can be used to both complement and supplement research conducted on this group in other major disciplines. ';

This book explores the interface of bodies and religion by investigating the impacts human-induced global warming will have on the embodied and performed practices of religion in ecologies of place. By utilizing analytical insights from religion and nature theory, posthumanism, queer ecologies, ecological animisms, indigenous knowledges, material feminisms, and performance studies the book advocates for a need to update how religious studies theorizes bodies and religion. It does so by in the first half of the book advocating for religious studies as a field, and the academy as a whole, to take the ongoing and deleterious future impacts of climate change seriously--to re-member that those laboring as scholars in religious studies, and the communities they study, have always been bodies in material bio-ecological places--and to let this inform the questions religious studies scholars ask. The book argues that this will lead to very different forms of engaged, liberatory scholarship that demands a different type of scholarship and public advocacy for resilience in the face of climate change. The second half of the book offers case study examples of how scholars may better engage religious bodies within petrocultures, while attending to new, emerging materialist posthuman assemblages of religious bodies. This book will be of interest to those in religious studies, the environmental humanities, and those working at the interface of the body and the natural world.

Communities are not static or stationary organisms. They are fluid and dynamic and change over time. The role of community development in the change and transformation of a community is critical to improving and enhancing the quality of life of the community and its residents. This book examines how community development changes a community and why that change matters, while also examining the relationship between community development and social capital. When a community improves its social capital, change can happen because people can leverage their networks to produce better results for themselves. This book also looks at comprehensive community development and collective impact models and several case studies that utilize these models. It also looks at how the transformation and revitalization of a neighborhood through new housing creates opportunities for people everywhere, and how effective placemaking strategies empower diverse groups of people in a community to reimagine their public spaces and the built environment to be more livable, walkable, creative, and sustainable while fostering greater connections with people in their community.