Books published by Lexington Books

Science Fiction and Anticipation: Utopias, Dystopias and Time Travel presents ten chapters discussing themes related to time travel, utopias, and dystopias in science fiction novels published in America and Europe between the 18th and 20th century. These themes include social progress, freedom and human rights, technological advances, and the issues of ethics, racism, sexism, censorship, and slavery. The contributors analyze novels such as The Year 2440 published in 1771, Paris in the Twentieth Century written by Jules Verne, Blake; or, The Huts of America by Martin Robinson Delany, The Amphibian Man by Alexander Belyaev, Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov, Ashes, Ashes by Rene Barjavel, The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster, Morel's Invention by Adolfo Bioy Casares, and writers of Spanish, Argentinian, English, and French fictions such as George Orwell, Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg and Leopoldo Antonio Lugones Arguello. This book notably presents their sources and influence, the accuracy of their predictions, and their relevance in our very unstable world.

Growing up in Latin America contributes to the growing body of scholarship on the representation of children and minors in contemporary Latin American literature and film. This volume looks closely at the question of agency and the role of minors as active participants in the complex historical processes of the Latin American continent during the 20th and 21st centuries, both as national citizens and as transnational migrants. Questions of gender, migration, violence, post-coloniality, and precarity are central to the analysis of childhood and youth narratives in this collection of essays.

Literary Connections between South Africa and the Lusophone World connects literatures and cultures of South Africa and the Portuguese-speaking nations of Africa and beyond, and is set within literary and cultural studies. The chapters gathered in this volume reinforce the critical and ongoing conversations in comparative and world literature from perspectives of the South. It outlines some possible theoretical and methodological starting points for a comparative framework that targets, transnationally, literatures from the South. This volume is an additional step to renew the critical potentialities of comparative literary studies (Spivak 2009) as well as of humanistic criticism itself (Said 2004) as South Africa and the Lusophone world (except its former colonizer, Portugal) are outside the spatial and cultural dimension usually defined as European and/or North American. In this sense and due to the evident geographical and socio-historical links between these regions, critical scholarship on their literary connections can contribute to unprecedented perspectives of representational practices within a broader contextual dimension, and in so doing, provides the emergence of what Boaventura de Sousa Santos called ';epistemologies of the South' (Santos 2016), as it considers cultural exchanges in the space of so-called ';overlapping territories' and ';intertwined histories' (Said 1993).

Online Learning, Instruction, and Research in Post-Pandemic Higher Education in Africa, edited by Martin Munyao, argues that beyond survival, universities need to adapt to technology-mediated communication learning in order to thrive. Disruptive technologies have recently proved to be means of thriving for institutions of higher learning. This book reflects on how leveraging on education technology has transformed teaching, learning, and research Higher Education Institutions (HEI) impacting Africa through digital transformation. In particular, HEIs are collaborating more now than ever before. Finally, this book addresses the challenges of teaching STEM programs online in Africa.

Climate Change Education: Reimagining the Future with Alternative Forms of Storytelling offers innovative approaches to teaching about climate change through storytelling forms that appeal to today's studentsclimate fiction and protest poetry, fiction and documentary films, video games and social media. The stories are used as exemplars, from exploring space debris to urban design planning to fast fashion, and they provide entry points for investigating particular aspects of climate science, including the local and global impacts of a warming planet. Each chapter provides analyses and strategies for fostering climate (and space) literacy through knowledge, empathy, and agency. Contributors from around the world encourage educators to answer students' calls for comprehensive K12 climate education by aligning pedagogy with real-world challenges in order to prepare students who understand the myriad injustices of the climate crisis and feel empowered to confront them. They share their own stories and urge educators to join the growing, hopeful movement for action, classroom by classroom.

The music, performances, and cultural impact of some of the most enduring figures in popular music are explored in Rock Music Icons: Musical and Cultural Impacts. This collection investigates authenticity, identity, and the power of the voices and images of widely circulated and shared artists that have become the soundtrack of our lives.

This book showcases the breadth of research-informed pedagogical approaches for Portuguese as an Additional/Foreign Language (PAL/PFL) carried out on topics ranging from the development of specific skills in PAL, to language awareness in PAL and innovative pedagogical approaches in PAL, involving new and experimental methodologies.

Persons living with disabilities (PLWDs) are imbued with inalienable human rights and have talents and potential that would aid in the Nigerian government's unceasing pursuit of economic development. However, under Nigeria's Fourth Republic since 1999, implementation of disability laws has been lethargic. In Improving Disability Laws under Nigerias Fourth Republic: Ten Measured Steps into the Future, Philip C. Aka and Joseph Abiodun Balogun explore measures for improving the capacity of the Nigerian national government to implement regional and global treaties related to disability that are human rights-centric. They emphasize the need for a human rights focus and for the Nigerian government to implement laws that support the potential of PLWDs, including their contributions to socioeconomic development.

Treating Philip Roth as a war writeras well as a sportswriter, crime reporter, political commentator, and Newark chroniclerRoth's Wars: A Career in Conflict offers a thoroughly researched account of the novelist's preoccupation with wars around the world and wars at home. This wide-ranging social and cultural history of Roth's career examines intersections between Roth's preoccupations as a writer and the work of contemporaries, such as J.D. Salinger, Joan Didion, George Plimpton, Hannah Arendt, E.L. Doctorow, Flannery O'Connor, Michael Herr, and Don DeLillo. The legends and icons who figure in this account of Roth's career include Dwight Eisenhower, Meyer Lansky, Ernie Pyle, Bob Dylan, Johnny Appleseed, Anne Frank, JFK, Mickey Mantle, the Marx Brothers, Thomas Paine, Sandy Koufax, and Franz Kafka.

Stories of Feminist Protest and Resistance: Digital Performative Assemblies foregrounds the importance of storytelling for coalition building, solidarity, and performative assembly. Bringing together scholars and activists from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, this book offers creative explorations, analyses, personal stories, and case studies of digital feminist activism that speak directly to the many ways that feminist communities assemble for the purposes of protest and resistance. Through various forms of feminist media mobilizations, from hashtag feminism and platform activism to personal blogs and meme accounts, these chapters explore how digital feminists use the long-standing tactics of storytelling to counter the dominant narratives of white supremacy, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and the intersecting oppressions that accompany such structures, both online and offline. By sharing stories of intersectional feminist assembly for collective justice, this book contributes to larger conversations about establishing alternative ways of seeing and being in the world, inviting others to assemble with us.

Constructivism dominates over other theories of knowledge in much of western academia, especially the humanities and social sciences. In Exposing the Roots of Constructivism: Nominalism and the Ontology of Knowledge, R. Scott Smith argues that constructivism is linked to the embrace of nominalism, the theory that everything is particular and located in space and time. Indeed, nominalism is sufficient for a view to be constructivist.However, the natural sciences still enjoy great prestige from the ';fact-value split.' They are often perceived as giving us knowledge of the facts of reality, and not merely our constructs. In contrast, ethics and religion, which also have been greatly influenced by nominalism, usually are perceived as giving us just our constructs and opinions. Yet, even the natural sciences have embraced nominalism, and Smith shows that this will undermine knowledge in those disciplines as well. Indeed, the author demonstrates that, at best, nominalism leaves us with only interpretations, but at worst, it undermines all knowledge whatsoever. However, there are many clear examples of knowledge we do have in the many different disciplines, and therefore those must be due to a different ontology of properties. Thus, nominalism should be rejected. In its place, the author defends a kind of Platonic realism about properties.

China and America's Tech War from AI to 5G examines how Sino-U.S. geopolitical competition has increasingly centered on the performances of the two countries' technology sectors and their ability to dominate development of critical next generation technologies. It analyzes and compares the strengths of China and the U.S., ranging from the ability to produce and attract talent, to the degree of government support and the scale and funding for technological research. Abrams reviews and weighs important technology areas such as green energy, artificial intelligence, Quantum Computing, and 5G will likely have, the means both parties have exercised to gain advantages, and the consequences of leadership for the county who attains it.

Indigenous Language for Development Communication in the Global South brings together voices from the margins in underrepresented regions of the Global South, within the context of scholarship focusing on indigenous languages and development communication. Contributors present cases as a starting point for further research and discussions about indigenous language and development communication in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Scholars of communication, sociology, linguistics, and development studies will find this book of particular interest.

Social Media Ethics and COVID-19: Well-Being, Truth, Misinformation and Authenticity explores ways that some of the best and worst moments of the pandemic resulted from the interconnection of social media and ethics. The ethical challenges social media poses for corporate providers, government officials, and users existed well before the outbreak of COVID-19: What responsibility do corporate providers bear for inaccurate information posted by users? What responsibility do users bear? In this ';post-truth' and polarized world, who defines ';accurate information'? During the height of the COVID-19 crisis, public health agencies, emergency management agencies, and traditional news media used social media to disseminate or to track information, while users found communities for shared values or experiences. At the same time, users posted and amplified inaccurate or misleading scientific and health information, engaged in hate, and escalated conspiracy theories that have proven detrimental to the public health response to COVID-19. Edited by Pamela A. Zeiser and Berrin A. Beasley, this collection brings together work from leading scholars in communication, English, philosophy, and political science to examine the ethical use of social media during COVID-19, offering both a multidisciplinary understanding of the subject and tools for managing the challenges found at the intersection of social media, ethics, and COVID-19.

This book provides an in-depth examination and analysis of the film and television adaptations of Lope de Vega's theatrical dramas that have appeared on Spanish screens since the mid-twentieth century. Using a multidisciplinary approach, Allen draws on critical media literacy studies, film and adaptation studies, literary theory, cultural studies, and cultural historiography in his analysis. Allen argues that, given the problematic reception of Lope's works in Francoist Spain, the canonical author never held a privileged position in the dictatorial propaganda machine. In fact, adaptations of Lope's theater productions were subject to the same rigorous scrutiny, if not more, than any other screenplays that landed under censorship's microscope. Allen analyzes adaptations produced during and after the nearly forty-year dictatorship and questions whether the adaptors of the democratic era created films and television shows that can sufficiently demonstrate how the spirit of Lope's life and works can resonate with modern audiences. Scholars of film and television studies, adaptation studies, and history will find this book particularly useful.

Radical Hope in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon: The Moon and Meteor provides a careful consideration of the authors career, examining the ways in which the subversion of his early novels feeds into the radical optimism of his later works. The books first half explores the authors use of the image of the Moon as a romanticized ideal that is irreparably corrupted by and corruptly manipulated by forces of worldly power. The second half takes up the meteor as an image of impending violence that has yet to be full realized, finding in the unlikely possibility of that violence being somehow averted, a reckless sort of hope. This foolhardy but nonetheless real hope to escape from violent, oppressive structures and forge a real ethical obligation to the other marks the development of these paired metaphors, and through them Pynchon introduces the possibility, however slight, that literature, with its powerfully intimate relationship with consciousness, may at least sustain that hope.

Environmental Sociology: Risk and Sustainability in Modernity examines the encounter between sociology and contemporary environmental issues. It presents the proposal for an environmental sociology considering the dilemmas surrounding sustainable development, ecological modernization, and risk society. In this book, Cristiano Luis Lenzi critically examines these concepts, aiming to show how controversial environmental sociology still is. The book offers a nuanced interpretation of some of the issues and disputes that arise in the debate over these approaches in the sociological literature.

The authors of Re-Indigenizing Ecological Consciousness and the Interconnectedness to Indigenous Identities share the diversity and complexities of the Indigenous context of worldviews, examining relationships between humans and other living beings within an eco-conscious lens. Michelle Montgomery's edited volume shows that we belong not only to a human community, but to a community of all nature as well. The contributors demonstrate that the reciprocity of Indigenous knowledges is inclusive and represents worldviews for regenerative solutions and the need to realign our view of the environment as a ';who' rather than an ';it.' This reciprocity is intertwined as an obligation of environmental ethics to acknowledge the attributes of Indigenous knowledges as not merely a body of knowledge but as multiple layers or levels of placed-based knowledges, identities, and lived experiences.

As one of the most prominent voices from and about the French Caribbean, Gisele Pineau has garnered significant scholarly attention; however, this interest has culminated in precious few volumes devoted entirely to the author and her work. In response to this lack of in-depth critical attention, Reimagining Resistance in Gisele Pineau's Works brings together a range of perspectives from both sides of the Atlantic and across the Pacific to explore the unique ways in which Gisele Pineau's works redefine the concept of resistance, particularly as it relates to gender, race, history, and Antillean identity. As this volume ultimately demonstrates, resistance holds up a mirror to the political, economic, and cultural forces that have shaped the past, construct the present, and build the future. It argues that Pineau's characters open the narrative frame for reading them and move us beyond the categories of the wholly defiant or the inherently complicit. Above all, as they invite us to reimagine resistance, they expose our expectations and hopefully shift our understanding about what it means to rise and to fall in a world we seek to call our own.

This book is a comparative study of Chinese and Russian policies in their respective inner peripheries. As the inner peripheries of the two states are rather vast, a selected number of regions have been chosen from the two geographical expanses. These regions are not only rich in hydrocarbons and minerals but also serve as conduits of the same. Moreover, the geographical position of the Caucasus provides Russia with an ingress into the Transcaucasia; a region that has often presented Moscow with serious challenges in international politics. Similarly, Xinjiang and Tibet serve as supply bases of hydrocarbon and mineral, and as conduits of the same to the Chinese regime. In addition to this, while Tibet serves as China's anchorage in Himalayas and a buffer zone against the Indian threat, Xinjiang is China's gateway to the resource rich Central Asian market. With both Russia and China on the path of changing the post-Soviet unipolar order; insights on Sino-Russian ties and the various challenges and opportunities available to the two states are inevitable for any reader trying to understand the complexity of international politics in general and of Chinese and Russian politics in particular of the twenty-first century.

Contemporary Wars and Conflicts over Land and Water in Africa highlights Africa's tragedy of endless conflicts. Rich in case studies, it examines violent conflicts and Africa's approaches to conflict resolution. The case studies show that Africa continues to be a chronically unstable space tormented especially by frequent and devastating civil wars of which ethnicity, religion, and bad governance are some of the root causes. These conflicts have occasioned massive human rights abuses, arrested development, reversed or slowed economic growth, created a vicious circle of instability and hunger, and exacerbated levels of poverty and disease in the continent. In the final part of this book, Carlson Anyangwe considers indigenous mechanisms for settling disputes, post-conflict transitional justice systems, and the African Union conflict-resolution mechanism that relies, as it does, on the United Nations' peace and security framework and the peace and security functions of the African regional economic organizations.

Organ Donation in Islam: The Interplay of Jurisprudence, Ethics, and Society delves into the complexities and nuances of organ donation in Muslim communities. A diverse group of authors including Muslim jurists, academic researchers, clinicians and policy stakeholders engage with the multi-faceted topic. Contributions from Sunni and Shia scholars are positioned alongside each other, giving the reader an appreciation of the different Islamic traditions and legal methodologies; and qualitative research examining the views and potential concerns of Muslim families towards donating organs of loved ones is juxtaposed with the work of academicians and community advocates engaging diverse Muslim communities to equip them with the knowledge and tools to make informed donation decisions. Taken together the collection yields new ethical, empirical and sociological insights into how issues of body ownership, the definition of death, and community engagement interface with the act of donation. Accordingly, this wide-ranging volume represents a invaluable resource for religious leaders, healthcare professionals, social scientists, policy makers, researchers, and others interested in the interplay between contemporary healthcare, religious tradition, health policy and the topic of organ donation.

In Ontologies and Natures: Knowledge about Health in Visual Culture, Fernando Gonzalez Rodriguez argues that visual culture offers insights into how societies perceive the role of nature in pursuits to cure and care for the human body. By using a set of visual surfaces and artefacts as entry points the book sheds light on ideas about nature as a healing source.

Grief is a universal human response to death and loss. Mourning is an equally universally observable practice that enables the bereaved to express their grief and come to terms with the reality of loss. Yet, despite their prevalence, there is no unified understanding of the nature and meaning of grief and mourning. The Meaning of Mourning: Perspectives on Death, Loss, and Grief brings together fifteen essays from diverse disciplines addressing the topics of death, grief, and mourning. The collection moves from general questions concerning the putative badness of death and the meaning of loss through the phenomenology and psychology of grief, to personal and cultural aspects of mourning. Contributors examine topics such as theodicy and grief, reproductive loss, mourning as a form of recognition of value, the roots of grief in early childhood, grief in COVID-times, hope, phenomenology of loss, public commemoration and mourning rituals, mourning for a devastated culture, the Necropolis of Glasgow, and the ';art of outliving.' Edited by Mikolaj Slawkowski-Rode, the volume provides a survey of the rich topography of methodologies, problems, approaches, and disciplines that are involved in the study of issues surrounding loss and our responses to it and guides the reader through a spectrum of perspectives, highlighting the connections and discontinuities between them.

Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest explores an annual interstate tug-of-war between two small towns along the Mississippi River. In this book, Johnston examines how media shapes place and identity of people at this festival. In writing this book, he conducted analysis of a ten year period of media coverage, and found that the experience people have while attending Tug Fest is quite different than what is said in classic novels about life on the Mississippi River.

Following Franoise d'Eaubonne's creation of the term ';ecofeminism' in 1974, scholars around the world have explored ways that the degradation of the environment and the subjugation of women are linked. In the nearly three decades since the publication of the classical work Ecofeminism by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva in 1993, several collections have appeared that apply ecofeminism to literary criticism, also known as feminist ecocriticism. The most recent of these include anthologies that emphasize international perspectives, furthering the comparative task launched by Mies and Shiva. To date, however, there have been no books devoted to gaining a broad-based understanding of feminist ecocriticism in India, understood in its own terms. Our new volume Indian Feminist Ecocriticism offers a survey of literature as seen through an ecofeminist lens by Indian scholars, which places contemporary literary analysis through a sampling of its diverse languages and in the context of millennia-old mythic traditions of India.

The ancient cento-genre was prone to be used on all kinds of subjects. New texts were created out of the classical epics. Empress Eudocia followed this practice and composed the story of Jesus in lines lifted almost verbatim from Homer's epics. Jesus and his relevance to her audience is thus presented within the confines of style and vocabulary offered by the Iliad and Odyssey. The lines picked to convey her theology are often clustered around key Homeric motifs or type scenes, such as warfare, homecoming, feast, reconciliation, hospitality. Jesus waging war against all evil and Hades in particular runs throughout this Homeric and simultaneously biblical epic. The story starts in the Old Testament which is conceived as a divine counsel on Mt. Olympus where a plan to save sinful humanity is presented. The narrative then follows the biographic lines of the canonical gospels, with John's Gospel holding pride of place in the way she renders and interprets the Jesus-story. The story told suspends both the geography and time of Jesus. Eudocia preaches the story she tells. She emerges in this poem as one of the most, if not the most prolific female theologian and preacher in the first Christian centuries.

Written in the 1990s after retirement from his services as a doctor and discovered by his daughter in the loft of their house in Darjeeling in India in 2017, this memoir of Dr. Tsewang Yishey Pemba provides an intricate portrayal of early twentieth-century Tibet. With his finger on the pulse of the Tibetan ethos, Pemba offers glimpses into the traditional sociology of Tibet and occasionally its snail-paced reforms, as well as the British Raj in India, while recollecting his young days in his native country. Pemba also draws information from prized sources like his fathers diaries and his conversations with Tibetan and British officials as well as people at the grassroots. His own metamorphosis, as he leaves Tibet in 1949 for higher education abroad, foreshadows the metamorphosis of Tibet and its inescapable fate in the decade that followed.

Recent public squabbles between American and Turkish leaders and lawmakers have led many to question what kind of an alliance Turkey and the United States have. This book is directly concerned with this question and attempts to shed light on every single detail related to the nature of this alliance. With discussions on the historical evolution of the bilateral relations and current disagreements on various issues such as the Turkish acquisition of Russian air defense systems and the Kurdish question in the Middle East, this study offers a lucid genealogy of the Turkish-American alliance for all those interested in the subject.

For the last twenty-thousand years, dogs and people have shared a unique bond in the animal kingdom. In How Our Love of Dogs Creates Social Conflict, James K. Beggan uses symbolic interaction to examine the meaning that dogs have for people as friends and family members. Although many animal rights advocates express dismay over the subordinate status ownership implies, the author argues that ownership creates a powerful psychological connection that makes it easier for people to imbue dogs with humanlike characteristics. Beggan outlines how dogs' sensitivity to inequity, in combination with a high degree of cognitive capacity, makes it possible for dogs to be active agents in creating conflict between people. The authors analysis of social conflict between people over their dogs connects to profound philosophical concepts about the nature of mind, the relationship between humans and animals, and the moral responsibility human beings have to dogs and other animals.