Books published by Lexington Books

On August 9, 1965, 53 men died in the impoverished hills of rural Arkansas. Their final breaths came in a government facility deep underground while their loved ones were at home expecting their return. The incident at Launch Complex 373-4 remains the deadliest accident to occur in a U.S. nuclear facility. The 53: Rituals, Grief, and a Titan II Missile Disaster analyzes the event. It looks at causes but more importantly at how the mishap has affected daughters and sons for nearly six decades. It gives new sociological insight on technological disasters and the sorrow following them. The book also details how surviving family members managed themselves and each other while benefiting from the support of friends and strangers. It describes how institutions blame the powerless, and how powerful organizations generate distrust and secondary trauma. With an analysis of the event and post-disaster life, their children share stories on what went wrong and how they keep moving forward.

This book treats six beloved films of Hitchcock: The 39 Steps, Saboteur, and North by Northwest, plus Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, and To Catch a Thief. Padilla reviews their production histories with an eye to classical influences, and then analyzes their links with Greek art, poetry, and philosophy.

Meredith Emigh-Guy combines criminological theories and FBI homicide data to examine recent trends in the homicide rate as well as the clearance rate. This work situates homicide statistics in the United States in a global and historical context by addressing questions of stranger-perpetrated homicide and intimate partner violence. Several potential reasons for a decline in the number of solved homicides are explored, including victim/offender relationships, weapons, and improvements in forensics. Emigh-Guy concludes that modern media representations have skewed the general public's understanding of violent crime and provides the statistics to show how reality differs from misconception.

This book invites readers on an exploratory journey through the intricate tapestry of China's history, culture, political climate, and social dynamics. At the heart of this exploration is the one-child policy, a revolutionary measure with far-reaching implications for the country's gender dynamics. By scrutinizing this policy and its repercussions, the book aims to uncover and interlink various elements of how the evolution, or in some instances, the stagnation of China's cultural and structural norms, has shaped and continues to influence women's lives and choices in contemporary China.

What happens when one empire or hegemon cedes the global stage to a rising power? Supplanting Empires: Power Transitions Across Human History argues that, historically, such power transitions tend to be relatively smooth, resulting in the preservation of the status quo with respect to the global order and institutions. This stems from the tendency of rising powers to be closely associated with declining powers, to the point that they generally support and perpetuate the old ways of governing. They maintain similar governing institutions, retain ties to the former empire's allies, and generally endorse the declining empire's ideology and norms. The violence involved in such transitions tends to be limited, and societies and economies are typically left undisturbed. To test this proposition, Kendall Stiles and his students undertake a systematic study of numerous power transitions across millennia of human history. The implications of these findings have considerable relevance with respect to the contemporary power struggle between the United States and China.

In Semantics and Poetics of the Righteous and the Wicked in the Psalms, Kevin Foth delves into the nuanced roles of the righteous and the wicked and explores their significance beyond conventional moral prototypes. The study argues that the figures of the righteous and the wicked should be considered as part of the conventions of Hebrew psalmody. By leveraging insights from lexical semantics of the terms ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ and ¿¿¿¿¿ throughout the Hebrew Bible, the study broadens the understanding of these terms in their multifaceted uses within poetic contexts. The analysis further employs narratological theories about character and characterization to elucidate how the contrast between the righteous and wicked functions within 18 individual psalms. By focusing on the specific contexts within psalms and embracing poetic diversity, this study enriches the understanding of how these figures contribute to the literary features and theological messages woven throughout the Book of Psalms.

Children have remained at the periphery of a dominant bioethics model that focuses on autonomy and envisions the normative human being as an independent, unencumbered, rational decision-maker. Adults who care for hospitalized children must do more to more fully recognize and appreciate their experiences and contributions in the moral landscape of healthcare. Exploring theological insight into vulnerability, dependence, and agency, Children, Theology, and Bioethics: Beyond Autonomy contends that theological anthropology can foster a posture of openness and responsiveness to the full humanity of children, and can reveal what it means to be human at every age. Interdisciplinary dialogue between bioethics, childhood studies, and pastoral theology is woven throughout with illustrative clinical vignettes from Jessica Bratt Carle's experience as a pediatric chaplain and clinical ethicist.

Universitas: Why Higher Education Must Be International intervenes with urgency in the debate on the virtues, and pitfalls of internationalizing higher education. It unites voices of academics from around the globe with considerable experience with international higher education in a well-considered defense of the university as a public space transcending locality, counteracting parochialism, and defending the quality of scholarship. All authors writing in this volume have themselves followed international trajectories, across different parts of the world. At the same time, all are now settled academics. They have been observing the relevant trends in their work environments and have been actively involved in managing them. Universitas brings their informed auto-ethnographic reflections in conversation with each other and connects them into a systematic analysis that allows us to recognize and communicate the virtues of internationalizing higher education and to better navigate its challenges. At the same time, the auto-biographical subtexts of the contributions vividly illustrate how international experiences impact personal and professional development and help make the case for defending the internationalization of higher education against its detractors.

A Shift in the Portrayal and Reception of Homosexuality from the Victorian to the Modern Period explores how the reception of homosexuality in literature evolved and morphed greatly from the late 19th century to the 20th century and how the gender of the author played a particularly import role. Victorian society scorned and punished gay men to a harsher degree due to the subversive, taboo, and "emasculating" nature of male homosexuality, as evident in the reception of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. In contrast, the Modern period saw a positive portrayal and reception of homosexuality in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Modern society as well as Victorian society accepted same-sex female relationships under the assumption that women were incapable of engaging in sexual acts-an assumption influenced by Queen Victoria. Thus, on the surface, both societies tolerated female homosexuality in literature. However, this distorted tolerance was a limiting and silencing force. Darby Dyer compares the homosexuality in the works and lives of Wilde and Woolf to other authors during their time periods to address how far queer representation has come in literature and other arts. She concludes with a call to action that the fight is not over.

A Critical Companion to Jane Campion offers a thorough and detailed study of the works of Jane Campion. This edited volume seeks a modern approach by blurring the frontiers between film and television, film theater releases, and platforms, and treats the entirety of Campion's her body of work as a meaningful whole. The chapters explore recurring themes and connections across Campion's oeuvre, including her complex feminine characters, exploration of New Zealand landscapes, love for literature, constant dialogue between media, and the influence of the Gothic. Contributors draw on a variety of scholarly approaches, methodologies, and perspectives to provide innovative readings of Campion's work that are sure to spark new discussions.

The Fight of Exiled Journalist and Anti-Communist Activist Josef Josten: For Freedom, Democracy, and Human Rights (1948-1985) explores the life and work of exiled Czech journalist Josef Josten (1913-1985) and his fight against the communist Soviet regime in his homeland. Josten was a tireless journalist, activist, and organizer of campaigns and initiatives to expose communist strategy and tactics. During his exile, he set up the Free Czechoslovakia Information Service, which issued the regular bulletin Features and News from Behind the Iron Curtain. His work culminated in the Free Czechoslovakia Campaign, and the establishment of the British Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted. This book offers insight into the Soviet directives regarding their relationship with Great Britain, the struggles of the Czech exile community, and the infiltration of the exile movement by Soviet secret agents.

Motivation in the Ancient Greek Ethos: Punishment, Shame, and Moral Guilt explores motivational techniques that were utilized in the Ancient Greek culture (from Archaic to Classical periods) to channel the reluctant agent's behavior in a desirable direction. Structured around several types of "appeal to fear" strategies--including an appeal to fears of divine retribution, earthly punishment, public disgrace, or oblivion--, this book analyzes these strategies with regard to their efficiency, practical applicability, and normative priority. In addition, Andrei G. Zavaliy argues that towards the end of the Classical period of Greek history the repertoire of the standard motivational strategies was enriched by a new possibility: an appeal to fear of self-shaming and, in general, to fear of painful inner qualms as a consequence of misbehavior. The latter type of incentive was clearly present in Democritus and appeared somewhat tangentially in Plato but was emphatically restated by Aristotle. Zaviliy further suggests that the type of psychic discomfort experienced by a wrongdoer, according to Aristotle, is structurally similar to the "pangs of conscience" in the way this phenomenon was developed during the late Hellenistic period, and, this Aristotelian psychic discomfort can thus be reasonably correlated with the feeling of moral guilt.

To tackle the paucity of adequate housing in the Muslim World, Strategic Rebuilding and Affordable Housing in the Muslim World brings together a cohort of essays that deal with the the latest approaches, policy discussions, attendant research methodologies and recommendations. The volume's multidisciplinary contributors- academics, practitioners, architects, planners, researchers, urbanists, economists-offer valuable insights and critical analysis on strategic rebuilding of affordable and adequate housing, as well as the continuous improvement of living conditions. Each chapter broadens our understanding of the 'house' as a source of stability and security for individuals or families because one's house is the center of emotional life, with its ability to provide serenity, safety, and self-worth. Therefore, weaving the many aspects of this argument together the contributors of this volume purport a point of view that is carefully well-thought-out to expand the focus from just addressing individual and family needs to looking at the wider community benefits. Furthermore, adequate housing will increasingly become the focus of re-settlement, urban renewal and re-investment, primarily to deal with the homeless conditions that already exist-the influx of refugees and internally displaced people (IDP's) as the result of natural disasters (earthquakes and floods) and the collateral damage caused by war.

Edward FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám Revisited: The Wine, the Vine, and the Rose examines an overlooked masterpiece which was a phenomenon in its day. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, translated by Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883), sold millions of copies between its first publication in 1859 and World War II, becoming one of the best-selling books of all time, only to disappear from the public eye until the age of the Internet revived interest in the work. Russell Brickey synthesizes scholarship and close reading in the first monograph dedicated to the Rubáiyát, taking into account the original poetry of Omar Khayyám (1038-1141), a polyglot who lived in medieval Persia, and the western poetic tradition that informed FitzGerald's creative palimpsest. These include the Song of Solomon, 17th century Cavalier Poetry, the Sonnet Sequence, and the poems of Alfred Tennyson, William Wordsworth, and others. This book looks at the offshoots of Omar Khayyám and Edward FitzGerald's poetic brotherhood, the pulp-novels, movies, and poems their poem inspired.

In this book, Luigi Manca and Alessandra Manca examine the use of utopian imagery in magazine advertisements from the 1970s through the early 2020s. Positing that these advertisements reflect the public's unbridled desires, rather than reality itself, the authors argue that these idealistic reflections can lead the public to be unable or unwilling to recognize real threats to democracy, social justice, and the environment. They extend this analysis to argue that political moderates have long underestimated the ability of mass media and charismatic, radical politicians to tap into the utopian dreams of millions of disillusioned-and predominantly white-Americans to leverage these dreams in order to further their own political agendas. Ultimately, this cumulative study spanning decades of advertisement history portrays a consumer utopia shaped almost exclusively by unrestrained consumer desire.

This edited volume focuses on slow media, an approach that fosters intentional and thoughtful engagement with media of all forms. Contributors explore our individual and community relations with analog and digital media by critiquing current power structures underpinning contemporary media sensibilities, processes, and technologies. Through these critiques, the authors pose crucial questions surrounding how to slow down and be intentional within the landscape of accelerated media technology innovation and ubiquity. Building on existing media studies theory, the essays in this volume explore case studies of the intersections between analog and digital media, share insights from personal slow media projects, and propose useful methods for ethical and thoughtful media practices for both producers and audiences. Ultimately, this volume prompts readers to contemplate and reconsider the role of media technologies in contemporary life.

Like its predecessor, Eternal Putin?: Confronting Navalny, the Pandemic, Sanctions, and War with Ukraine (Lexington, 2023), Vladimir Putin's Version of 'War and Peace': The Battle for the Russian Home Front, 2022-24 is a chronological and descriptive account of almost all facets of Russian life during a very short period of time; i.e. from the onset of Russia's war on Ukraine in February 2022 to its presidential election in March 2024. Its strength lies in its wealth of detail on Russia's home front. To set the stage, the first chapters cover the course of war primarily focused on the consequences of the war for Russians at home. The ripple effects follow in chapters on Russia's politics, its economy, human and civil rights, and the Kremlin's international relationships. Among the subjects featured in sub-sections are the 'foreign agent' frenzy, pressure against the LGBT community, schools as incubators of young 'patriots', healthcare, the environment, the media, Russia's new diaspora in exile, the Russian Orthodox Church's role, war crimes, and international sport. Putin as vozhd (leader) is the subject of one chapter. Russia's forced and chosen pivot to the East for political and economic allies are also examined. Above all, this book highlights the Russian government's attempts to create a loyal citizenry. Nowhere else is the battle for the home front covered so thoroughly.

In this book, Deborah Geis offers a new approach to the evolving genre of culinary films that center on the acts of eating and cooking through close analyses of ten different films. These films range from the classics, like Big Night (1996) and Babette's Feast (1987) to later box-office hits, like Chef (2014) and to films that deserve a second look, like East Side Sushi (2014), Burnt (2015), and Mid-August Lunch (2008). Throughout these analyses, the book focuses on tropes including the "big dinner" as it connects to intercultural and transcultural communities; the self-destructive perfectionism of the obsessive chef; and the craft of cooking in relation to aging and mortality. Geis invites readers and viewers to experience food-driven narrative films with an appetite for appreciating the visual ingredients and the ways in which they construct pleasure through the act of looking as a vicarious approach to consuming the actual food. Drawing on the work of film theorist Christian Metz, Geis ultimately poses a new paradigm for watching and understanding culinary cinema as a significant - and constantly-evolving - genre that comes with its own conventions and contemporary filmmakers who seek to expand and transform those conventions in surprising ways.

Arguing that January 6th was just the tip of the iceberg, this book reveals the full impact of white Christian nationalism on the United States. Flowers explores how white Christian nationalism has infused its agenda in social, cultural, legislative, and political aspects of life in an effort to move the United States toward becoming an authoritarian theocratic white ethnostate. Part of the larger far-right enterprise, white Christian nationalism is unique in the way in which it pulls a variety of far-right ideologies together. These ideologies include anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+, antisemitism, authoritarianism, Christian nationalism, ethnonationalism, male supremacy, racism, sexism, and xenophobia. Understanding the way these ideologies complement each other and are perpetuated is the only route to resist them.

In this book, Mark Ward Sr. draws on a combination of ethnographic, autoethnographic, and sociolinguistic research to identify and analyze white evangelicals' distinctive speech code from a perspective rooted deeply in both communication studies and the evangelical community. Ward posits that the Bible, positioned as the one dominant symbol that unifies all meaning, leads to the widespread adoption of the language of literalism driving evangelical identity, patriarchy, anti-intellectualism, authoritarianism, and Christian nationalism. This, he argues, divides the world into a cosmic war between secular humanism and an all-encompassing "biblical worldview." Ward's positionality as both an ethnographer of religious communication who has observed white evangelical culture for two decades and also as a self-identified evangelical for four decades makes him uniquely qualified to casting an insider's critical yet balanced eye on conservative white Christian culture. This book will complement existing scholarship within anthropology and sociology-where evangelicalism has been studied in conjunction with the rise of the Religious Right-and will contribute unique insights from the religious communication subdiscipline.

Through historical and current cultural abjection of the "animal" and the "bad queer," Queer and Animal Provocations: Homonormativity, Animal Exploitation, and Sexual Violence provides insight into the relationship between queer people and animals to show how homonormative aspirations of "good queers" can unwittingly further entrench animal abuse. To uncover this connection, this book travels through notions of queer citizenship, animal justice, colonial constructs of the human, and queer movements for liberation. Jessica Ison explores encounters between the discourse of queer liberation and animal abjection, through the use of advertisements, corporate sponsors, media articles, laws, activist movements, and lobbying efforts, to discover how the struggles for acceptable queer identity are entwined with entrenching animal exploitation. This book disentangles the exploitation of animals from queer liberation, arguing for scholars and activists to take action in future struggles through solidarity and mutual support within the abolition of cages and systems of injustice.

In The Contemporary Fantastic: Reimagining Reality in French Fiction, Amanda Vredenburgh identifies a contemporary shift in the use of fantastic modalities in French fiction, no longer dominated by the desire to escape the disappointments of reality nor the reader's hesitation about the reality of the novel's events, but by its innovative confrontation with the real. What could bizarre, uncanny, or supernatural literary representations have to tell us about very urgent, real issues like the environmental crisis, racism, migration, and the formation of egalitarian communities? Through close readings of a selection of novels by Marie Darrieussecq, Marie NDiaye, and Antoine Volodine, Vredenburgh argues that the ability to blur boundaries gives the fantastic both an emancipatory and reparative function in its engagement with contemporary political issues. These authors complicate categories such as human/nonhuman, French/foreign, inclusion/exclusion, and individual/community and shift the focus to the experiential and affective dimensions of these issues, ultimately allowing us to better think and feel with those that are excluded. Vredenburgh concludes that this use of the fantastic has a specific ethical stance, which encourages a community-based approach founded on compassion and inclusion.

Defending the view that Karl Jaspers' concept of irrationality (Widervernunft) is better able to account for pathological patterns of individual and collective thinking, Karl Jaspers' Theory of Irrationality: From Delusions to Worldviews argues that irrationality is incorrigibility, a blockage of reason as the will to communication. Highlighting the importance of freedom and creativity at the heart of reason (Vernunft), Daniel Adsett analyzes examples of delusional thought through a Jaspersian lens. He shows that irrationality arises when we hold to certain attitudes with an incorrigible conviction and refuse to genuinely consider the possibility that we might need to revise or change our beliefs. In presenting these arguments, Adsett offers a novel contribution to contemporary debates about the character of reason while rehabilitating an often neglected aspect of Jaspers' thought.

Shifting Production to Southeast Asia: Electronics Transnational Corporations Moving to Vietnam since the 2000s explores how a labor-intensive industry has been expanded from the 'World Factory' - China to developing Southeast Asia under the changing dynamics in the global and regional production networks, including the recent COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical tension, by using the case study of the production relocations of the consumer electronics manufacturing industry to Vietnam. David Yuen Tung Chan and Chun Yang explore the changing trade and investment patterns as well as the transformations of the electronics production networks and the changing roles and functions of China, Vietnam and other Asian countries, the relocations of firms and the strategic coupling with Vietnam, as well as the impacts of the post-pandemic dynamics. The shifting electronics production from China to Vietnam, which increased since the mid-2000s, is not a simple expansion led by the conventional lead firms from the 'North' solely to cut costs, but it is a rather complicated and multiscale process that has been simultaneously driven by various tiers of firms and levels of governments from different origins out of various dynamics at different spatial scales.

Edited by Eric M. Bridges, Sheila Smith McKoy, and LaJuan Simpson-Wilkey, The Wisdom of Ifá: An Ancient Paradigm for the 21st Century and Beyond explores Yoruba spirituality and the complex ways in which the acknowledgement of Ifá as a wisdom source can be used to address the needs of humanity in the twenty-first century and beyond. Through rituals and practices that honor nature's rhythms, the contributors explore how Ifá guides us towards sustainable coexistence with our environment, recognizing that our well-being is intricately linked to the health of the planet. The contributors also show how, in the realm of environmental stewardship, Ifá offers a holistic worldview that recognizes the interconnectedness of all life forms. This book offers discussions on environmentalism, gender, and politics that connect across the bounds of time, through the history, mythology, and lived realities of the tradition. As an ancient wisdom tradition that has enriched West African cultures, Ifá offers a roadmap for modern civilization to charter new paths for humanity and the challenges that we face.

Jewish Women Science Fiction Writers Create Future Females: Gender, Temporality-and Yentas, the fourth volume in Marleen S. Barr's Future Females critical feminist science fiction anthology series, is the first essay collection devoted to Jewish women science fiction writers. The anthology forges new alliances across disciplinary boundaries-feminist theory, science fiction, and Jewish Studies-by forming a scholarly force, consisting of established critical voices and cutting-edge, fresh perspectives. Acknowledging the growing cultural popularity of science fiction, Barr's goal is to showcase new vistas for exploring gender through Jewish women's science fiction visions. It is time for Jewish women science fiction writers to receive the focused critical examination they deserve.

A Critical Companion to David Lynch builds on the vast debate of one of the most discussed and researched directors of the present era, with commercial and critical success across multiple mediums and genres. This edited volume provides a wide-ranging exploration of Lynch's films, practices, and collaborations, with nineteen original chapters examining themes including narrativity, aesthetics, artistry, sound, experimentation, metafiction, and patriarchy from the disciplinary perspectives of film studies, art studies, gender studies, literary studies, and philosophy. Lynch's entire thought-provoking oeuvre, spanning over fifty years, will be examined, including his shorts and films, animations, TV series, paintings, and commercials.