Books published by Lexington Books

Overworked and Undervalued: Black Women and Success in America is a collection of essays written by Black female scholars, educators, and students as well as public policy, behavioral, and mental health professionals. The contributors' share their experiences and frustrations with White America which continues to demand excessive labor and one-sided relationships of Black women while it simultaneously diminishes them. The book describes the ongoing struggle for women of color in general, but Black women in particular, which derives from the experience that only certain parts of our identities are deemed acceptable. The essays reflect on the events of the last few years and the toll the related stress has taken on each author. As a whole, the book offers its readers an opportunity to gain insight into these women's experiences and to find their place in supporting the Black women in their lives.

In Elizabeth Taylor: Icon of American Empire, Gloria Shin contends that the eponymous movie star is a model of postcolonial whiteness as her tenure as the most beautiful and famous woman in the world coincides with the era of postcolonialism in the 1950s and 1960s. Taylor is examined through a series of overlapping readings: as the Mistress in a cycle of Hollywood plantation films in the 1950s, via her extra-cinematic image as an exoticized jet-setting wanton seductress in the 1960s, through her repatriation to the U.S. and the election of her pro-military husband to the U.S. Senate in the 1970s, and her evolution as a relentless AIDS activist in the 1980s. Across these interpretative frames, Taylor emerges as the figuration who performs the vast possibilities open to postcolonial whites for mobility, pleasure, and political agency while operating without the burdens of race that allows her stardom to be symbolic of American Empire at the apex of its power.

Fire Alarm: The Investigation of the U.S. House Select Committee on Benghazi is a study of legislative-executive friction, partisanship, and Congresss attempt to recount events surrounding the September 11, 2012, terrorist attack that killed four Americans. Using publicly available sources, Bradley F. Podliska details the history of congressional investigations, arguing that both Republicans and Democrats use taxpayer-funded investigations as an arena to mount political attacks for electoral advantage. He traces the events of September 11, 2012, and applies a new partisan model to frame the role of Speakers of the House John Boehner and Paul Ryan in investigating the Obama administration's attack response and post-attack narrative. Employing qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the divisive investigation, Podliska finds Speaker Boehner's selection of party loyalists for the committee, placement of vetted staff in crucial investigative assignments to ensure execution of party strategy, and emphasis on former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, minimized the examination of White House, Department of Defense, and Intelligence Community responses. As a result, the investigation failed to determine responsibility for U.S. policy in Libya, the author of the post-attack narrative, and why the military did not perform a timely rescue.

According to Avicenna, whatever exists, while it exists, exists of necessity. Not all beings, however, exist with the same kind of necessity. Instead, they exist either necessarily per se or necessarily per aliud. Avicenna on the Necessity of the Actual: His Interpretation of Four Aristotelian Arguments explains how Avicenna uses these modal claims to show that God is the efficient as well as the final cause of an eternally existing cosmos. In particular, Celia Kathryn Hatherly shows how Avicenna uses four Aristotelian arguments to prove this very un-Aristotelian conclusion. These arguments include Aristotles argument for the finitude of efficient causes in Metaphysics 2; his proof for the prime mover in the Physics and Metaphysics 12; his argument against the Megarians in Metaphysics 9; and his argument for the mutual entailment between the necessary and the eternal in De Caelo 1.12. Moreover, Hatherly contends, when Avicennas versions of these arguments are correctly interpreted using his distinctive understanding of necessity and possibility, the objections raised against them by his contemporaries and modern scholars fail.

Understanding and Improving how K-12 Multilinguals are Taught: Supporting Multilinguals details instructional strategies that can be used to better assess multilingual learners which are more improved than the existing evaluations. The author argues that assessments for multilingual learners need to be improved due to inequities within the public-school systems, and that assessments for students in K12 schools are not equitable. The author also discusses strategies for welcoming and supporting multilingual learners in the classroom. The instructional strategies outlined for K12 educators includes offering students multiple test-taking options, ensuring that assessments are translated into students respective languages, and allowing multilingual learners to take assessments in groups or pairs. These improvement strategies have been developed by using feedback from dual-language teachers in the K12 public school system. The assessment issues that will be addressed include inequity within assessments administered to multilingual learners, the way assessments are structured and developed at the district and school level, the consideration of the immigrant experience as these assessments are being developed, the roles of school boards in considering immigrant experiences while creating these assessments, the role of the teachers of multilingual learners, assessment strategies to support multilingual learners, and strategies that are effective in creating inclusive classrooms for native and multilingual English speakers.

Rethinking Sage Philosophy: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on and beyond H. Odera Oruka discusses a variety of aspects of Henry Odera Oruka's sage philosophy project, rethinking it with a view to current demands and recent debates in scholarship across several disciplines. Edited by Kai Kresse and Oriare Nyarwath, the collection engages perspectives and interests from within and beyond African philosophy and African studies, including anthropology, literature, postcolonial critique, and decolonial scholarship. The chapters focus on: studies of women sages; sage philosophy in relation to oral literature; an Acholi poem on being human in context; takes on aesthetics and gender in Maasai thought; a comparative discussion of Oruka's and Gramsci's approaches to the relevance of philosophy in society; a critical review of method; a comparative discussion dedicated to the project of decolonization, with a South African case study; and a conceptual reconsideration of Orukas understanding of sages, presenting the pragmatic sage as typical of the late phase of the sage philosophy project.

Religion and Sexuality in Zimbabwe highlights the complex interplay between religion and sexuality in Zimbabwe. It shows how religion both facilitates and complicates the expression of sexuality in Zimbabwe. Approaching religion from a broader perspective, this volume reviews the impact of African Indigenous Religions and Christianity in its varied forms on the construction and expression of sexuality in Zimbabwe. These contributors examine the role of indigenous beliefs, as well as interpretations of sacred texts, in the understanding of sexuality in Zimbabwe. They also address themes relating to sexual diversity and sexual and gender-based violence. Overall, this book sheds light on the ongoing relevance and strategic role of religion to contemporary discourses on human sexuality.

In one of the most charming works to survive from classical antiquity, Xenophon's Symposium depicts an amiable evening of wine, entertainment, and conversation shared by Socrates, and a few of his associates, with certain Athenian gentlemen who are gathered to honor a young man for his recent victory in the Panathenaic games. The subtle playfulness which characterizes the animated discussions conceals a light-hearted, yet surprisingly philosophical inquiry regarding the rival claims of virtue, articulated and defended by the Socratics and gentlemen to establish the praiseworthiness and excellence of their competing ways of life. Gentlemanliness, taken as an admired political virtue, and philosophy, as pursuit of wisdom and self-sufficiency, emerge as contested ideas about what constitutes the path to human happiness, especially in response to the beautiful and its compelling arousal of erotic desire in the body and soul. Offering a comprehensive account and interpretation of the Symposium, this book follows the speeches and action of the dialogue through its many twists and turns, from beginning to end, with particular attention to the place of rhetoric in the argument of the work as a whole. Thus, Xenophons Socratic Rhetoric examines foundational aspects of the philosophic life manifest in the words as well as deeds of Socrates in this dialogue--starting from an original reading of the opening scene as a harbinger of the competition in wisdom that occurs over the course of the symposium, and concluding with a provocative consideration of conjugal erotics as the continuation and completion of the Socratic logos about the role of love in guiding human beings toward virtue and happiness.

Music, Sound, and Documentary Film in the Global South, edited by Christopher L. Ballengee, represents an important step toward thinking about the production and analysis of the soundscapes of documentary film, all while exploring a range of social, cultural, technological, and theoretical questions relevant to current trends in Global South studies. Written by a diverse set of authors, including filmmakers, academics, and cultural critics, the ten essays in this book provide fresh evaluations of the place of music and sound in documentary films outside the European-American milieu. On the whole, the authors illuminate how the invention of documentary film was at first a product of the colonialist project. Yet over time, access to filmmaking technologies led to the creation of documentary films relevant for local communities and national identities. In this sense, documentary film in the Global South might be broadly defined as a mode of personally or politically mediated storytelling that, by one route or another, has become a useful and recognizable means of memorializing traumatic histories and critiquing everyday lived experience. As the essays in this volume attest, close readings of documentary soundscapes provide fresh perspectives on ways of hearing and ways of being heard in the Global South.

Institutional Harassment: Divorce, Abuse, and the Legal System offers a psychological approach to the instances of harassment within the justice system related to cases of divorce. Miguel Clemente recognizes that this harassment often goes unaddressed and pays particular attention to the effects this has on children. He covers several forms of harassment including intimate partner aggression, sexual abuse of children, the unscientific parental alienation syndrome, and the weaponization of the legal system from aggressors seeking revenge.

In the decade spanning 20102020, social media showcased growing celebrations of lifetime milestones across multiple platforms. Utilizing theoretical and methodological approaches based in cultural studies, Milestone Celebrations in the Age of Social Media analyzes social media phenomena including gender-reveal parties; promposals; publicized marriage proposals; divorce celebrations; and the rites of the Death Positive Movement. Carly Gieseler illustrates how the public sharing of major life events on social media platforms reshapes the way we communicate about topics including courtship, birth, marriage, divorce, and death. While each trend represents a unique occasion, these celebrations share themes inherent to our human experience in the digital age. Culminating in the wake of the pandemic and its impact on each communal celebration, this book illustrates one of our most vital human drivesconnection.

The interpretation of the Bible is intricately interwoven with the history of and rhetoric of European colonization. During the modern era, the traditions of biblical interpretation played a crucial framing role in the emergence of industrialized nation-states, the capitalist mode of production, and the colonial enterprises of European powers. While the Bible has been used to justify the power of ruling classes and dominating nations, it has also been a source of liberative and resistant political discourse. In this book, Niall McKay uses the tools of literary materialism to read the gospel of Mark and build upon the representational epistemology and patterns of interpretation of the rich Marxism of the Frankfurt school. This reading is framed against and around the liberative biblical movements of late colonial and post-colonial South Africa in order to develop ';ways of reading' which are generative of liberation. As a consequence, the author makes a valuable contribution to an ongoing politics and practice of resistance that is attentive to issues of religious collaboration, liberation, colonialism, and the ends of late capitalism.

Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Reformation: Literary Negotiation of Religious Difference explores how Shakespeare's plays dramatize key issues of the Elizabethan Reformation, the conflict between the sacred, the critical, and the disenchanted; alternatively, the Catholic, the Protestant, and the secular. Each play imagines their reconciliation or the failure of reconcilation. The Catholic sacred is shadowed by its degeneration into superstition, Protestant critique by its unintended (fissaparous) consequences, the secular ordinary by stark disenchantment. Shakespeare shows how all three perspectives are needed if society is to face its intractable problems, thus providing a powerful model for our own ecumenical dialogues. Shakespeare begins with history plays contrasting the saintly but impractical King Henry VI, whose assassination is the 'primal crime,' with the pragmatic and secular Henry IV, until imagining in the later 1590's how Hal can reconnect with sacred sources. At the same time in his comedies, Shakespeare imagines cooperative ways of resolving the national 'comedy of errors,' of sorting out erotic and marital and contemplative confusions by applying his triple lens. His late Elizabethan comedies achieve a polished balance of wit and devotion, ordinary and the sacred, old and new orders. Hamlet is Shakespeare's ultimate Elizabethan consideration of these issues, its so-called lack of objective correlation a response to the unsorted trauma of the Reformation.

American Boarding School Fiction, 19812021: Inclusion and Scandal is a study of contemporary American boarding-school narratives. Before the 1980s, writers of American boarding-school fiction tended to concentrate on mournful teenagers. When teachers, parents, and other adults appeared, they were usually placed far from the center of the action. The center was filled with white, male, Protestant students at boarding schools. In this book, Alexander H. Pitofsky discusses a new generation of writersincluding Richard A. Hawley, Anita Shreve, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Tobias Wolff that has transformed school fiction by highlighting issues relating to gender, race, scandal, sexuality, education, and social class in unprecedented ways. By turning their attention away from the bruised feelings of teenagers, Pitofsky argues, these authors have reinvented American boarding-school fiction, writing vividly about a host of subjects the genre overlooked in the past.

What if wilderness is bad for wildlife? This question motivates the philosophical investigation in Wilderness, Morality, and Value. Environmentalists aim to protect wilderness, and for good reasons, but wilderness entails unremittent, incalculable suffering for its non-human habitants. Given that it will become increasingly possible to augment nature in ways that ameliorates some of this suffering, the morality of wilderness preservation is itself in question. Joshua S. Duclos argues that the technological and ethical reality of the Anthropocene warrants a fundamental reassessment of the value of wilderness. After exposing the moral ambiguity of wilderness preservation, he explores the value of wilderness itself by engaging with anthropocentricism and nonanthropocentrism; sentientism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism; and instrumental value and intrinsic value. Duclos argues that the value of wilderness is a narrow form of anthropocentric intrinsic value, one with a religio-spiritual dimension. By integrating scholarship from bioethics on the norms of engineering human nature with debates in environmental ethics concerning the prospect of engineering non-human nature, Wilderness, Morality, and Value sets the stage for wilderness ethicsor wilderness faithin the Anthropocene.

Popular Hindi cinema has become a significant signpost of contemporaneity due to its construction of social language. Generally, Hindi cinema has been understood through internal (auteur or genre or cinema verite) and external aspects (consumption spheres and moviegoers' complex response in the form of catharsis or everydayness mimesis). However, cinema also needs a new way of discerning with respect to ';Dalit Representation'. The study needs to look at the construction and meaning of the social language of Hindi cinema. Construction refers to exploring factors beyond the film industry responsible for shaping the social language. Meaning entails the exhibition of social language in the form of messages. Herein, relational exploration becomes crucial. The relationship between factors of social language of Hindi cinema and Dalits must be unraveled for understanding the meaning of social language for Dalits. Contested representation encompasses the nature of absence and presence of Dalits in Hindi cinema.

In this book, Nathan Miczo demonstrates that humor operates at different levels of identity, exploring how within- and between-group dynamics shape the creation and reception of disparagement humor. While positive forms of humor arise in interpersonal settings, negative forms reflect the activation of group-based, communal identities. Building on this dual sociality view, Miczo critiques the superiority theory of disparagement humor, rooted in Hobbes's definition of laughter, and tied to his notion of a ';war of all against all.' Miczo employs the agon (Greek for contest) to replace the Hobbesian metaphor with a view that groups use disparagement humor to pursue rival goals. This perspective forwards the multifunctional utility of humor in social life, analyzing examples of naturally occurring interaction drawn from studies in Communication, Psychology, and Anthropology. Scholars of humor studies, communication, and anthropology, will find this book of particular interest.

Henri Lefebvre, Boredom, and Everyday Life culls together the scattered fragments of Henri Lefebvre's (19011991) unrealized sociology of boredom. In assembling these fragments, sprinkled through Lefebvre's vast oeuvre, Patrick Gamsby constructs the core elements of Lefebvre's latent theory of boredom. Themes of time (modernity, everyday), space (urban, suburban), and mass culture (culture industry, industry culture) are explored throughout the book, unveiling a concealed dialectical movement at work with the experience of boredom. In analyzing the dialectic of boredom, Gamsby argues that Lefebvre's project of a critique of everyday life is key for making sense of the linkages between boredom and everyday life in the modern world.

Nicole C. Dittmer offers a reimagining of the popular Gothic female ';monster' figure in early-to-mid-Victorian literature. Regardless of the extensive scholarship concerning monstrosities, these pre-fin-de-siecle figurations have often been neglected by critical studies or interpreted as fragments of mind and body which create a division between culture and nature. In Monstrous Women and Ecofeminism, Dittmer deploys monism to delineate from and contest such dualism, unifies the material-immaterial aspects of fictional women, and blurs the distinction between nature-culture. Blending intertextual disciplines of medical sciences, ecofeminism, and fiction, she exposes female monstrosities as material and semiotic figurations. This book, then, identifies how women in the Victorian Gothic are informed by the entanglement of both immaterial discourses and material conditions. When repressed by social customs, the monistic mind-body of the material-semiotic figure reacts to and disrupts processes of ontology, transforming women into ';wild' and ';monstrous' (re)presentations.

Microhistory unlocked new avenues of historical investigation and methodologies and helped uncover the past of individuals, an event, or a small community. Reclamation of ';lost histories' of individuals and colonized communities of colonial South Africa falls within this category. This study provides historical narratives of indigenous Khoikhoi of modest status absorbed into Cape colonial society as farm servants during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Based on archival and other sources, the author illuminates the ';everyday life' and ';lived experience' of Khoikhoi characters in a unique way. The opening chapter recounts the love-loathe drama between a Khoikhoi woman, Griet, and Hendrik Eksteen, whose murder she later orchestrated with the aid of slaves and Khoikhoi servants. The malcontent Andries De Necker, arrested for the murder of his Khoikhoi servant, attracted much legal attention and resulted in a protracted trial. The book next features the Khoikhoi millenarian prophet-turned-Christian convert Jan Paerl, who persuaded believers to reassert the land of their birth and liberate themselves from Dutch colonial rule by October 25, 1788. The last two chapters examine the lives of four Khoikhoi converts immersed into the Moravian missionary world and how they were exhibited by missionaries and sketched by the colonial artist, George F. Angas.

The debate over US involvement in World War II was a turning point in the history of both US foreign policy and radio. In this book the author argues that the debate's historical significance cannot be fully appreciated unless these stories are understood in relation rather than in isolation.All the participants in the Great Debate took for granted the importance of radio and made it central to their efforts. While they generally worked within radio's rules, they also tried to work around or even break those rules, setting the stage for changes that ultimately altered the way media managed American political discourse.This study breaks with traditional accounts that see radio as an industry biased in favor of interventionism. Rather, radio fully aired the opposing positions in the debate. It nonetheless failed to resolve fully their differences. Despite the initial enthusiasm for radio's educational potential, participants on both sides came to doubt their conviction that radio could change minds. Radio increasingly became a tool to rally existing supporters more than to recruit new ones. Only events ended the debate over US involvement in World War II. The larger questionof what role the US should play in world affairsremained.

The Qur'anic verses 18:6082 in Surat al-Kahf present the story of Khidr and Moses as a lesson on the modalities of being and of knowing. Traditionally, the story is seen from a variety of vantage points that include historical, textual, literary, and allegorical, each of which is framed differently depending on the religio-cultural context. This book, in addition to examining the theological sources, traces the story's mythical, mystical, and popular interpretations engendered by the Qur'anic story. The author argues that the story's major contribution is its ability to communicate the importance of cultivating humilitya fundamental goal for any person of faith. Despite his importance in the Qur'an, Moses is not the main hero in this story; instead, he is used to point to an even higher truth pertaining to the spiritual dimensions of faith. This book suggests that Khidr's Qur'anic story symbolizes these truths by providing a perspective on the tension between materiality and spirituality, the zahir (exoteric) and the batin (esoteric), and human and divine forms of knowledge. Additionally, in this work, the Khidr narrative is viewed as a source of nourishment for theories that speak to the intersectionality between Islam and other religious traditions.

Each chapter in this collection offers a practical approach for using literature to engage and empower students to confront aspects of climate crises. Educators from different backgrounds and parts of the world share their experience using novels, short stories, drama, poetry, and nonfiction to help students understand the causes and consequences of climate change as well as how they can contribute to potential solutions.

Reading Habermas: Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere dissolves Habermas's monolithic stylization to precisely access his seminal distinction between the purely political polis of antiquity, which excludes the private economy from the res publica, and the modern public sphere with its rational-critical discourse about commodity exchange and social labor in the political economy. Deconstructing the uniform mold of Structural Transformation's narrative about a rise and fall of the bourgeois public sphere in modernity also allows to identify and understand the ideology-critical methodologies of Habermas's theory reconstruction of Kant's ideal of the liberal public in the context of the French Revolution. Readers of this guide realize that Habermas's interpretation of a sociological and political category with the norms of constitutional theory and intellectual history causes the ';collapsing of norm and description' he acknowledged in 1989 and thus frequent misunderstandings about the historical validity of Structural Transformation's ideal-type derived from Condorcet's absolute rationalism and Kant's ';unofficial' philosophy of history. Specifically, the guide explains that Habermas's key construct of a ';morally pretentious rationality' of the bourgeois public sphere entirely depends on the claim about ';natural laws' harmoniously regulating the economy. While neoliberalism still maintains this claim, Hegel ';decisively destroyed' it already in 1821.

In Righting Health Policy, D. Robert MacDougall argues that bioethics needs but does not have adequate tools for justifying law and policy. Bioethics' tools are mostly theories about what we owe each other. But justifying laws and policies requires more; at a minimum, it requires tools for explaining the legitimacy of actions intended to control or influence others. It consequently requires political, rather than moral, philosophy. After showing how bioethicists have consistently failed to use tools suitable for achieving their political aims, MacDougall develops an interpretation of Kant's political philosophy. On this account, the legitimacy of health laws does not derive from the morality of the behaviors they require but derives instead from their role in securing our equal freedom from each other. MacDougall uses this Kantian account to show the importance of political philosophy for bioethics. First, he shows how evaluating kidney markets in terms of the legitimacy of prohibiting sales rather than the morality of selling kidneys reverses the widely accepted view that Kantian philosophy supports legally prohibiting markets. Second, MacDougall argues that an account of political authority is necessary for settling longstanding bioethics debates about the legal and even moral standards that should govern informed consent.

Technologies of Refuge and Displacement: Rethinking Digital Divides aims to theoretically and practically understand technology access and use from the perspective of those on the ';wrong' side of the digital divide. Specifically, it examines refugees as a group that has received scant attention as technology users, despite their urgent need for technological access to sustain tenuous links to family and loved ones during displacement. It draws from over 100 interviews and surveys with refugees conducted from 2007 to 2011, utilizing this empirical data to interrogate well-known theories about technology and its users. In doing so, it seeks to rethink the popular model of ';digital divide' and offer alternative ways of conceptualizing technology literacy and access. It examines how principles from design and IT industries can be applied to contexts with constrained availability, access, and affordability to provide technology services that accommodate users with limited technical and language literacies.

In recent years, a large number of young Japanese have been migrating to New York and London for the purpose of engaging in cultural production in areas such as dance, fashion, DJing, film, and pop arts in the hope of 'making it' as artists. In the past, this kind of cultural migration was restricted to relatively small, elite groups, such as American artists in Paris in the 1920's, but Cultural Migrants from Japan looks at the phenomenon of tens of thousands of ordinary, middle-class Japanese youths who are moving to these cities for cultural purposes, and it questions how this shift in cultural migration can be explained. Following Appadurai's theory of the relation between electronic media and mass migration, and using ethnographies of twenty-two young migrants over a five year period, Fujita examines how television, film, and the internet influence this mobility. She challenges emerging orthodoxies in the general discussion of transnationalism, demonstrating the disjunction migrants experience between the pre-existing expectations created by media exposure, and the reality of creating and living as a 'transnational' artist participating in a global community. Intersecting long-term, multi-sited ethnography with emerging transnational and globalization theory, Cultural Migrants from Japan is a timely look at the emerging shift in concepts of national identity and migration.

In this book, Emeka C. Anaedozie examines Pan-African history, focusing on sociocultural commonalities and challenges facing African people. Anaedozie argues that Pan-African resistance to oppression represents the best future for Africans both on the African continent and abroad in the United States.

Asian Tragedies in the Americas: Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Stories examines stories of nineteenth-century Asian migrants across the Americas.

This study examines social interactions in long-term refugee camps on the Thai-Burmese border. Based on seventeen months of participant observation, the author's analysis illuminates the social order in refugee camps beyond state and humanitarian governance.