Books published by Lexington Books

This book discusses the rise of Putin in Russia and Erdogan in Turkey to authoritarian power in the context of the global debate over the fragility of democracy and the persistence of authoritarianism. It is both historical and theoretical in it treatment of the politics, economics and international relations of Russia and Turkey.

Community-based wildlife conservation is promoted as a win-win solution for wildlife and people that protects biodiversity while improving the economic status of communities living among wildlife. This book, based on mixed-method anthropological research conducted in Samburu County, Kenya, demonstrates that, counter to simple narratives promising benefits, community-based wildlife conservancies (CBCs) are complex social institutions layered on pre-existing land use practices with differential impacts for members. Through in-depth research in three communities, Carolyn K. Lesorogol explains how diverse social actors understand and operate CBCs, how benefits and costs are distributed, the gendered nature of CBCs, and how they impact cooperation and conflict in communities. Lesorogol's analysis shows that economic benefits to members are generally very limited, and while many perceive improvements in security emanating from CBCs, there is also evidence that they heighten tensions over land use as well as human-wildlife conflict. Looking toward the future, the book includes recommendations for improving the effectiveness and accountability of CBCs. Conservation and Community in Kenya: Milking the Elephant offers critical insights into the implications of the CBC model for local pastoralist livelihoods, conservation, and social relations.

Perhaps no arcade game is so nostalgically remembered, yet so critically bemoaned, as Dragon's Lair. A bit of a technological neanderthal, the game implemented a unique combination of videogame components and home video replay, garnering great popular media and user attention in a moment of contracted economic returns and popularity for the videogame arcade business. But subsequently, writers and critics have cast the game aside as a cautionary tale of bad game design. In Dragon's Lair and the Fantasy of Interactivity, MJ Clarke revives Dragon's Lair as a fascinating textual experiment interlaced with powerful industrial strategies, institutional discourse, and textual desires around key notions of interactivity and fantasy. Constructing a multifaceted historical study of the game that considers its design, its makers, its recording medium, and its in-game imagery, Clarke suggests that the more appropriate metaphor for Dragon's Lair is not that of a neanderthal, but a socio-technical network, infusing and advancing debates about the production and consumption of new screen technologies. Far from being the gaming failure posited by evolutionary-minded lay critics, Clarke argues, Dragon's Lair offers a fascinating provisional solution to still-unsettled questions about screen media.

Towards a Realist Philosophy of History argues for the radicalat least in contemporary historical theoryview that historians are by and large successful in their goal of providing accurate knowledge and understanding about the historical past. Adam Timmins provides a philosophical framework that supports this endeavor, as well as highlighting some of the issues with the strong constructivist accounts common in contemporary historical theory. Among other things, the book provides a realist construal of colligatory concepts, historiographical reference, and the use of narrative, as well as examining the mechanisms of historiographical progress. The work also provides some much-needed criticism of aspects of the strong constructivist position, such as the contemporary adoption of ';irrealism' and the idealist implications of this, that has have yet failed to make their way into the existing literature. The book proves that historical theory has not ';moved on' from the realism-idealism debate and that realism with regards to the products of historiography is still very much a live option.

This volume explores the development of political parties in nineteenth-century United States of America through an extensive analysis of the official statements by a party in an election, the party platforms, and their connection with political elites and voters. Platforms indicate how party leaders reconciled local, state, and national conflicts and articulated their electoral appeals to various constituencies by showing discussions of their respective policies. Thus, party platforms are a valuable vehicle to assess electoral strategy and party development.By focusing on the platforms of the major political partiesDemocrats, Whigs, and Republicansat the state and national levels in presidential elections from 1840 to 1896, the author identifies three salient patterns. First, platforms reference economic policy more frequently and to a greater degree than other policy areas. Second, national policies are discussed more than state policies. And third, over time, the content of the platforms becomes more similar, reflecting the nationalization of the party system.This examination of nineteenth-century American party platforms traces political party development as a dynamic process involving partisanship, the presentation of internally coherent and consistent messages to voters, and polarization, the existence of conflicting policy positions across parties.

Multidimensional Peacebuilding analyzes the role of local actors in working towards sustainable peace in Mindanao, Philippines. Wendy Kroeker examines the mediatory and solidarity-affirming role of these peacebuilders in the ongoing peace process regarding the conflict in Mindanao.

Contemporary philosophy is interested in questions of luck and moral responsibility. Christian theology is largely unconcerned with luck because of its understanding of the creatureliness of the will. This understanding is rooted in story of the primal sin the narrative about how the first good creature chose wrongly. When considered philosophically, this story produces a problem for describing how a good creature can sin in ideal circumstances. The tradition has appealed to a voluntarist account of the devil''s sin as a satisfying response to this problem. But some have worried that this kind of free choice succumbs to a responsibility denying kind of luck. This volume describes how this underlying story undermines worries about luck for Christian moral reasoning by reflecting on how any luck the devil has is his own. John R. Gilhooly argues that even if one regards the Devil as fictional, the primal sin remains an interesting philosophical test case, particularly for questions of moral luck. The reason that this is so is because it seems that moral luck is either irrelevant to moral judgment of the Devil, or an illegitimate moral concern at least as regards the primal sin.

This book explores the relationships between rock and roll, social protest, and authenticity to consider how rock and roll could function as social protest music. The author begins by discussing the nature and origins of rock and roll and the nature of social protest and social protest music within the wider context of the evolution of the commercial music industry and the social and technological infrastructure developed for the mass dissemination of popular music. This discussion is followed by an examination of the causes of the public disapproval originally expressed toward rock and roll, and how they illuminate its social protest and subversive quality. By further investigating the nature of authenticity and its relationship to social protest and to commercialization, the author considers how social protest and commercialization are antithetical. This conclusion, if correct, has broad implications for human culture in advanced industrial society.

In Ecotheology and Love: The Converging Poetics of Sohrab Sepehri and James Baldwin, Bahar Davary points to the interrelation of religion, poetry, and ecology from a comparative perspective with an emphasis on decoloniality. This work shows how authors Sohrab Seperhi and James Baldwin sought social justice by building their work on love and an authentic way of knowing the world based on an interconnected knowledge of the self. The layers of depth in Sepehri and Baldwin's works and their immediacy for our time has yet to be fully understood, but through Ecotheology and Love, Davary takes a significant step towards achieving such a fuller understanding.

In You Must Be Born Again: Phillis Wheatley as Prophetic Poet, the author argues that Phillis Wheatley is the mother of liberation theology. The author uses Wheatley's poetry and life experiences to create a portrait of Wheatley beyond that of a poet. Wheatley is described as both poet and visionary who wrestles with God during the creative process. The lyrical expressions of Wheatley's poetry unlock the spiritual impressions on her heart. The author sets up the racial dynamics of Wheatley's time and her engagement with those politics. As a preacher, Wheatley combats the immoral undercurrent that erodes the community's social, economic, and spiritual foundation as well as its political systems. The author positions Wheatley as one uniquely qualified to address the hypocrisy within her world and, by implication, present-day society by calling for immersion into a radical understanding of love and justice, resulting in a renewed hope for equality and a pathway toward equity.

In this book, Nydia Flores-Ferrn offers a comprehensive examination of linguistic intensification in Spanish and English communication. Flores-Ferrn examines how intensification is defined as well as the various linguistic features, strategies, and devices we employ to escalate and amplify our oral and written communication. The book builds on a rich body of literature, exploring the conceptualization of linguistic intensification within socio-pragmatics and Persuasion Theory. This book also demonstrates the applicability of intensification in language learning by discussing techniques native speakers use to amplify the illocution of their communication.

Mentored to Perfection: The Masculine Terms of Success in Academia examines how mentoring programs between women tend to replicate the hierarchical relations of patriarchy that they are meant to dismantle. Simone Dennis and Alison Behie argue that, while paradigmatic mentoring programs look like networking support services for neophytes, these mentorships nevertheless replicate the very institutional structures they seek to uproot. The generosity that senior women show to junior women as they share their tips and offer their support ironically obscures participants' involvement in debt relations and the biases of replicating a particular type of success. This book considers the possibilities for disrupting our tendency to reproduce ourselves in the masculine terms of success.

This is first book in English dealing with the history of the Socialist Internationalthe international alliance of social democratic partiesduring the presidency of former German Chancellor Willy Brandt from 19761992. This book is based on thorough studies in numerous European and Latin American archives. It tries to avoid a Eurocentric view, giving equal importance to the Latin American and the European actors. It takes a fresh look at party diplomacy, a new kind of international diplomacy that was introduced by Willy Brandt in the field of international relations in the 1970s and 1980s. This study brings new insights in European as well as Latin American history of this time. It has a special focus on the role of Social Democrats (European as well as Latin American) in the civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s, and on its repercussions on domestic policies in Germany, Venezuela etc., and on the relations of those countries with the U.S. government.

Software mediates a great deal of human musical activity. The writing, running, and maintenance of code lies at the heart of such software. Code Musicology: From Hardwired to Software argues why it is time for a ';code musicology,' then outlines what that should entail. A code musicology opens a conduit between musicology and software studies, providing insights into both of these now interlinked fields along the way. It extends an ethnomusicology of technoculture from the world of hardware and the hardwired to software, code, and algorithms. For popular music studies, it helps direct attention to a newly relevant industrial focusIT and software-centered transnational commerceas a result of sectorial transformation.Denis Crowdy demonstrates how analysis from software studies, critical code studies, and the digital humanities offers insights into power relations, diversity, and commerce in music. Crowdy weaves readings of code and application programming interfaces (APIs) into the discussion, as well as ethnomusicological fieldwork exploring music and mobile phones from the Global South. Analysis of the author's own music apps and associated distribution infrastructure provides unique insights into the machinations of music ';appification.'

This study argues that the language of ';death' as a present human plight in Romans 58 is best understood against the background of Hellenistic moral-psychological discourse, in which ';death' refers to a state of moral bondage in which a person's rational will is dominated by passions associated with the body. It is death of this sort, rather than human mortality or a cosmic power called ';Death,' that entered the world through the transgression of Adam and Eve in Eden. Moral death was imposed on humanity as a judgment against this initial transgression, in order to increase sinful behavior, which ultimately serves to increase the magnitude of the glorious revelation of God's grace through Jesus Christ. Likewise, creation's subjection to ';corruption' and ';futility' in Romans 8 involves the detrimental effects of human moral corruption, not the physical corruption of death and decay. Ultimately, the plight on which Paul focuses much of his attention throughout Rom 58 is a matter of morality, not mortality.

This book examines the politics and international relations of Central Europe (the Visegrd Four) three decades after the fall of communism. Once bound together by a common geopolitical vision of returning to the West, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia now find themselves in a more ambiguous position. The 2015 European migration crisis exposed serious normative differences with Western Europe, leading to a collective V4 rebellion against the European Unions migration policies. At the same time, as this book demonstratesdespite this normative rift with Western Europe and despite the democratic backsliding in some of the V4 statesthey remain deeply dependent on the West in both symbolic and material terms. Furthermore, ways in which individual Central European states position themselves vis-a-vis the West exhibit notable differences, informed by their specific political and cultural legacies. The author examines these in separate country chapters. This book also contains a chapter that analyzes the effect of the COVID-19 crisis on political discourses in the V4.

Drawing from nature experience, dance, anthropology, and shamanism, Dr. Eline Kieft explores improvised movement as a pathway to insight, healing, transformation, and direct interaction with source. Dancing in the Muddy Temple takes the reader on a journey through multiple layers of embodied spirituality based in movement and embedded in the land. Addressing existential questions outside of mainstream religions, the book seeks possibilities for a spirituality that dances with the sacred life force within and all around us. Starting within the body, and always using movement as a way of knowing, Kieft expands on further concrete and subtle layers of connection. A sensorial immersion in the land develops into an expansion of consciousness and meeting intangible aspects of nature. After exploring the role of ceremony in contemporary times, the book concludes with an unexpected chapter on healing, drawing together insights for a dynamic approach to health and wholeness as innate part of an embodied spirituality. Moving seamlessly between her personal, professional, and academic background, Kieft creates an unusual scholarship in which bodily and autobiographical narrative are neatly interwoven with interdisciplinary literature. Its uniqueness lies in a radical integration of theory and practice, which brings an aliveness to the material that stirs an inquisitive desire to move, rooted in language that inspires confidence for personal inquiry into a rich and complex territory. This inspiring book offers an intricate road map to explore and strengthen the interwovenness of various layers of self, surroundings and the sacred, distilling tools for a practical, moving spirituality of the everyday.

With a postcolonially-inflected concern, this book attempts to approach in an interdisciplinary manner a set of narratives that have not been previously explored in western academia. It offers a discussion about the aesthetic, discursive, and cultural implications of Zafz¿f 's works that rethink canonical formations of literary texts in Morocco.

Carolyn M. Cunningham and Heather M. Crandall analyze the rise of climate activist girls who manage to advance the climate movement using social media, ingenuity, and an intersectional approach. United and focused, they confront the challenges of global systems and cultures that maintain power through all kinds of oppression.

How should we think of perceptual experiences qua dynamic phenomena? Against an increasingly popular Heraclitean approach that frames them as irreducibly dynamic, the present book argues that perceptual experiences may be described in terms of non-dynamic categories, such as properties, relations, and states.

This volume brings forensic and cultural anthropology closer together through case studies of structural violence and power. Paying attention to how death further marginalizes minoritized populations, this volume goes beyond conventional forensic anthropology and sheds light on the field's potential to address social injustice.

This book has two specific objectives. First is to examine the Kurdish regional impacts by looking at the engagement of non-state actors such as Kurds in Syria, the PKK, and ISIS; second is to analyze the challenges and the opportunities raised after 2011 for implementation of the ZPN policy towards Iraqi Kurdistan by Turkey.

It seems that every single issue in Eurasia and the world becomes a battleground among the great powers. This book's initiative is to categorize the battlegrounds as three aspects: national/regional/international conflicts, institutions/alliances, and projects.

A Critical Evaluation of "Territorial Separation" as a Method of Addressing Ethnic Conflicts addresses the question of how to address ethnic conflicts in Kirkuk as a diverse multi-ethnic city. It analyzes territorial separation as a new untested method to address ethnic conflicts in Kirkuk.

The Romance of Regionalism in the Work of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald: The South Side of Paradise explores resonances of "Southernness" in works by American culture's leading literary couple. At the height of their fame, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald dramatized their relationship as a romance of regionalism, as the charming tale of a Northern man wooing a Southern belle. Their writing exposes deeper sectional conflicts, however: from the seemingly unexorcisable fixation with the Civil War and the historical revisionism of the Lost Cause to popular culture's depiction of the South as an artistically deprived, economically broken backwater, the couple challenged early twentieth-century stereotypes of life below the Mason-Dixon line.From their most famous efforts (The Great Gatsby and Save Me the Waltz) to their more overlooked and obscure (Scott's 1932 story "Family in the Wind," Zelda's "The Iceberg," published in 1918 before she even met her husband), Scott and Zelda returned obsessively to the challenges of defining Southern identity in a country in which "going south" meant decay and dissolution. Contributors to this volume tackle a range of Southern topics, including belle culture, the picturesque and the Gothic, Confederate commemoration and race relations, and regional reconciliation. As the collection demonstrates, the Fitzgeralds' fortuitous meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1918 sparked a Southern renascence in miniature.

In this book, Martin Lundsteen investigates the often overlooked political-economic aspects of mosque conflicts. Focusing on the mosque project in Barcelona, Lundsteen takes a socio-spatial approach, investigating both the local and global processes of contemporary capitalism.

This book explains Islamic commercial laws, economics, banking, finance, and capital market. It provides educative materials for lawyers, practitioners, regulators, students taking Islamic banking and finance courses and those who are interested in learning more about the Islamic finance industry's doctrine and practice.

An Ecology of Communication addresses an ecological and communicative dilemma: the universe, earth, and socio-cultural life world are resoundingly dialogic, yet we have created modern and postmodern cultures largely governed by monologue. This book is indispensable reading for scholars and students of communication, ecology, and social sciences, as it moves readers beyond the anthropocentric bias of communication study toward a listening-based model of communication, an essential move for discerning fitting responses and the call to responsibility in an age of ecocrisis.

Mixtape Nostalgia: Culture, Memory, and Representation tells the story of the mixtape from its history in 1970s bootlegging to its resurgence as an icon of nostalgic analog technology. Burns looks at the history of the mixtape from the early 1980s and the rise of the cassette as a fundamental aspect of the music industry. Stories from music fans collecting hip hop mixtapes in the Bronx or recording songs off the radio permeate the book. She discusses the continued contemporary appeal of the mixtape as musicians, novelists, memoirists, playwrights, and even podcasters have used it as a metaphor for connection and identity. From Rob Sheffield's Love is a Mix Tape to Questlove's Mixtape Potluck Cookbook, Burns analyzes how the mixtape can function as a plot point, a stand-in for emotional connection, or an organizing structure. The book shows how creators use the iconography of the mixtape cassette to create ephemera, from coffee subscriptions to board games, which speaks to the appreciation of the tangible and the analog. The desire to find connection through sharing a physical artifact permeates the various creative uses of the mixtape. From blockbuster films like Guardians of the Galaxy to mixtape throw pillows, Burns highlights the mixtape as a site of collective memory tied to youth culture, community identity, and sharing music.

Ma Yuan: The Chinese Avant-Garde, Metafiction, and Post-Postmodernism in the works of Ma Yuan provides the most comprehensive study to date on one of China's most influential contemporary authors, Ma Yuan. By engaging in close readings of narratologically complex works of metafiction, the author offers a reappraisal of the role Ma Yuan played within the rise of postmodern fiction within China and offers new interpretive possibilities for the Chinese Avant-Garde movement of the 1980s through demonstrating that rather than being predominantly ';formalist word games' or ';narrative traps', Ma Yuan's works of metafiction functioned as Foucauldian ';heterotopias' which allowed for the creation of distinctly Post-modern and Post-socialist ';possible worlds'. This book also analyses Ma Yuan's recent post-2000 output and in doing so explores the shifting dynamics of literary self-reflexivity and the ';Post-postmodern' within the contemporary context of ';Xi Jinping era modernity'. This book argues that Ma Yuan's recent works display a distinct movement towards ';metamodern' aesthetics alongside a rising anthropocenic awareness and eco-consciousness which offer key insights into the post-postmodern condition within a Chinese context.