Books published by Lexington Books

Images of the Anthropocene in Speculative Fiction examines how the Anthropocene and its challenges are addressed by contemporary writers in a variety of genres broadly defined as speculative fiction. The book demonstrates that speculative fiction, can alter the readers' perception of their duties and responsibilities towards their communities.

E.N. Anderson and Barbara A. Anderson examine why individuals and whole nations become complicit in genocide. They present leading research on the characteristics of those most susceptible to genocidal messages and outline counteractive strategies.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of human trafficking in Cambodia and the mechanisms of poverty in Southeast Asia. By examining personal narratives, the author traces trafficked women's efforts to liberate themselves from the poverty trap with the aid of external supporting organizations.

This book examines women's access to justice in both traditional and statutory courts through an intersectional lens. It analyzes the lived experiences of women and their access to justice by situating the courtroom as both a spatial and a temporal arena for seeking justice (as litigants) and for seeking access to the bench (as judges).

In A Consequentialist Defense of Libertarianism, Richard Fumerton argues that empirical facts concerning consequences must always play a crucial role in a plausible defense of freedom. After making distinctions between morality and law, he defends the view that it is a fundamental mistake to think that the law should always, or even usually, attempt to mirror morality. With this framework in place, Fumerton addresses various controversial questions concerning when the law ought to side with freedom. He offers a nuanced defense of several positions shared by many "moderate" libertarians.This consequentialist defense of freedom offers a fresh perspective on some very old philosophical debates. As more people become frustrated with a perceived lack of principled attempts by established political parties to appreciate important concerns people have involving their desire for freedom, the issues discussed in this book are particularly timely.

This collection of essays by Kim Scipes explores efforts to build global labor solidarity from the bottom up through analyses of the KMU Labor Center of the Philippines, AFL-CIO foreign policy, and contemporary initiatives.

This interdisciplinary study examines the relationship between violence, empowerment, and the teenage super/heroine in comics and young adult fantasy novels. The author analyzes stories of teenage super/heroines who have experienced trauma, abduction, assault, and sexual violence that has led to a loss of agency, and then tracks the way that their use of violence empowers them to reclaim agency over their lives and bodies. The author identifies these characters as vigilante feminist teenage super/heroines because they become vigilantes in order to protect other girls and young women from violence and create safer communities. The teenage super/heroines examined in this book are characters who have the abilitythrough super power, or supernatural and magical abilityto fight back against those who seek to cause them harm. They are a product of and a response to both the pervasive culture of violence against girls and women and a system that fails to protect girls and women from harm. While this book is part of a robust intellectual conversation about the role of girls and women in popular literature and culture and about feminist analyses of comics and YA literature, it is unique in its reading of violence as empowerment and in its careful tracingand namingof the teenage vigilante super/heroine, a characterization that is hugely popular and deserves this close reading.

In Smallpox in Washingtons Army: Disease, War and Society during the Revolutionary War, the author argues that smallpox played an integral role in military affairs for both the British and Continental armies, and impacted soldiers and civilians throughout the War for American Independence. Due to the Royal army's policy of troop inoculation and because many British soldiers were already immune to the variola virus, the American army was initially at a disadvantage. Most American colonists were highly susceptible to this dreaded disease, and its presence was greatly feared. General George Washington was keenly aware of this disadvantage and, despite his own doubts, embarked on a policy of inoculation to protect his troops. Use of this controversial, innovative, and effective medical procedure leveled the playing field within the armies. However, by 1777, smallpox spread throughout America as soldiers interacted with civilian populations. Once military action moved south, American and British auxiliary troops and the enslaved Southern population all succumbed to the disease, creating a disorderly, dangerous situation as the war ends. Washington's implementation of isolation policies as well as mass troop inoculation removed the threat of epidemic smallpox and ultimately protected American soldiers and civilians from the dangers of this much feared disease.

In Communicating in the Anthropocene: Intimate Relations, the contributors analyze how to live in connection with other beings in the face of crisis and to engage the concept of the Anthropocene from within.

How God relates to the world lies at the heart of the most intense debates in modern theological and philosophy. Movements of Nouvelle Theologie, process theology, radical orthodoxy, modern Trinitarian theology and postmodern theology (i.e. Jean-Luc Marion) all seek to reconsider God's relation to the world as a corrective of what they perceive as problematic. Of particular significance is the recent revival of the theology of participation, as promoted by Radical Orthodoxy in UK and Hans Boersma in North America. Facing excessive secularism and fragmentation of the modern Western world, Radical Orthodoxy and Boersma resort to the pre-modern theology of participation as the way forward. Relying heavily on Platonism, however, their participatory theology, as critics pointed out, tends to compromise the intrinsic goodness of the creation. In this book, Ge proposes that a distinctively Christian theology of participation anchored in creatio ex nihilo, developed by Augustine and brought to the fore by Aquinas, provides a more promising solution which not only secures the unity of things in God but also the goodness of creaturely plurality. Since participation in its origin is a solution to the problem of the One and the Many, Ge employs Gunton's framework of the one and the many in his discussion of Augustine and Aquinas's theologies of participation. By reshaping their concepts of participation in the light of the doctrine of creation, Ge argues, these thinkers have profoundly transformed the metaphysics of participation, making it finally more suitable for describing the unique relationship between God's unity and creaturely plurality. This Christian metaphysics of participation is not only an advance on Radical Orthodoxy and Boersma, but also superior to competing theories of reality such as pluralism and reductionist physicalism. The book will also bring out implications for modern science-religion dialogues, the core of which concerns how God relates to the world.

This book examines play and religion in American literature, exploring a unique kind of modern piety that arises not based on fixed doctrines or ecclesiastical structures, but on a light-handed responsiveness of spirit that constantly adapts to new perspectives and revises fixed assumptions in the light of new experiences.

In Democratic Theory Naturalized, Walter Horn proposes his theory of "CHOICE Voluntarism" to distill populism to its core premise: giving people the power to govern themselves without the constraints imposed by those on the left or the right. Horn analyzes what makes for fair aggregation and appropriate, deliberative representation.

This monograph offers a close reading of the financial story of Netflix, exposing the central importance of narrativity, performative language, and affect, which drive the speculative worlds of global finance, technology, and now television.

FBI Files on Mexicans and Chicanos, 1940-1980 is a multi-chapter book that examines the FBI files on multiple, well known Mexican and Chicanos, as well as the Texas Farm Workers Union and the American G.I. Forum and, the Zoot Suit police riots in Los Angeles, California during the 1940s.

In Indigenous and Christian Perspectives in Dialogue, the author uses the discipline of comparative theology to illumine how Indigenous insights can unearth a fresh theology of place. He proposes that certain places are kairotic, and so kenotic, harmonic, poetic and especially enlightening at the margins where we meet the religious other.

How is Iran governed? Is the state accountable to its society? How have Iran's political institutions evolved since the 1979 revolution? In short, Postrevolutionary Iran: the Leader, the People, and the Three Powers argues that the answers to these critical questions are neither as certain nor as fixed as much of the existing literature on this topic would lead one to believe. Part 1 of the book (chapters 13) analyzes what Iran's Constitution refers to as ';the Three Powers': the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government along with the unique mediating institutions of the Guardian and Expediency Councils. In each chapter, the author describes the unique structure and function of the governing institution as outlined in Irans Constitution, then explains how the institution has evolved in practice over time. Several trends emerge from this analysis, including, among others, the growing influence of the military in politics, the expanding power of the Guardian Council at the expense of the parliament, and the widening asymmetry of executive power favoring the supreme leader at the expense of the president. In Part 2 of the book (chapters 46), the analytical focus shifts from Iran's formal political institutions to consider instead the relationship between state and society more broadly, with chapters on Irans military and economic structure, social movements, and public attitudes and the media. Finally, in the concluding chapter, the author offers a comprehensive view of what this analysis of Iran's political institutions in theory and practice reveals about both the resilience of Iran's political system and its capacity for meaningful change.

Electing Madam Vice President presents the presidential bids of the six women who ran for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in 2020 and the historic, groundbreaking vice-presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris. When Vice President Kamala Harris and her family moved into Number One Observatory Circle, the official Vice Presidential residence of the United States, she claimed a title no other women in the United States ever had: Vice President. She is closer to the United States presidency than any woman in history. Yet, she has repeated often that she is standing on the shoulders of women who have come before her to try to break down barriers, including the United States Presidency. Often left off the history pages, and out of many Americans' minds, are the bids of women who run for president. The 2020 Democratic primary included the most women ever to run in one election. This book demonstrates the progress women candidates have made as they have moved from symbolic to viable candidates and shines a light on the diminishing obstacles that face women candidates while taking readers on a journey through the victorious progress of a woman United States Vice President.

God, Race, and History examines how Christian theologies of providence have served as sites at which race has been constructed and resisted in modernity. It articulates an account of providence as the presence of Jesus Christ in the struggles of ordinary, overlooked, and oppressed human creatures to survive and flourish.

The removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families gained national attention in Australia following the Bringing Them Home Report in 1997. However, the voices of Indigenous parents were largely missing from the Report. The Inquiry attributed their lack of testimony to the impact of trauma and the silencing impact of parents' overwhelming sense of guilt and despair; a submission by Link-Up NSW commented on Aboriginal mothers being ';unwilling and unable to speak about the immense pain, grief and anguish that losing their children had caused them.'This book explores what happened to Aboriginal mothers who had children removed and why they have overwhelmingly remained silent about their experiences. Identifying the structural barriers to Aboriginal mothering in the Stolen Generations era, the author examines how contemporary laws, policies and practices increased the likelihood of Aboriginal child removal and argues that negative perceptions of Aboriginal mothering underpinned removal processes, with tragic consequences. This book makes an important contribution to understanding the history of the Stolen Generations and highlights the importance of designing inclusive truth-telling processes that enable a diversity of perspectives to be shared.

In Postcolonial Preaching, HyeRan Kim-Cragg calls for a postcolonial approach to preaching that takes identity, liturgy, migration and practice seriously. To address our current context, she proposes six concepts as essential elements of postcolonial homiletics: Rehearsal, Imagination, Place, Pattern, Language, Exegesis.

Creating Your Own Space explores the reasons for the use of the house as a metaphor by analyzing two literary works and a particular metaphor, such as the house as a prison or the house as a place of economic freedom.

In Portland's Good Life, R. Bruce Stephenson discusses how Portland's investment in sustainability helped stave off climate change and COVID-19. Stephenson tells the timeless story of the city's private citizens who, devoted to the public good and grounded in the good life, built a city that honors their humanity.

A Critical Companion to Stanley Kubrick provides an in-depth analysis of the director's work and offers an enriching view of the historical, philosophical, theoretical, artistic, and cinematic dimensions of his films. The eighteen chapters in this book provide innovative readings of Kubrick's oeuvre that will surely spark new discussions.