Books published by Lexington Books

Tilling Sacred Grounds examines Black women's interiority and negotiation of race, gender, and sexuality in religious spaces and religious practices. Phillis Isabella Sheppard argues for the importance of the exchange between interiority and public spaces, and examines religion in cyberspace, art, ritual, and street ministry. She refigures the location of religious experience by retrieving Black women's interiority as religious space. Often excluded from Black religious studies, interiority is necessary for understanding Black women's complex and even unconscious relationship with religion. The book weaves a thread by stressing that interiority has subjective, intersubjective, conscious, unconscious, and relational dimensions formed in historical, and social contexts.

Riccards and Flagg examine in detail the development of Franklin Delano Roosevelt from a young politician in Albany to assistant secretary of the Navy to governor of the state of New York. The volume shows how Roosevelt developed his rhetorical skills, his art of manipulation and coalition building, and his incredible bond to the American people through the Depression and World War II. As commander in chief, he mastered the leadership skills that made him a great military leader and a political leader who established himself as a paramount figure using control of the Democratic party. In the process, he solidified the party as a long-lasting coalition that set the United States as a world empire.

The Bohemian reformer Jan Hus made a substantial and critical contribution to the development of the medieval church, owing especially to his views and teachings on Scripture, the church, faith, conscience, and spirituality. This book offers a presentation of Hus's theological commitment centered on his understanding of truth. Lek and Franklin explore Huss preaching ministry and his long-drawn-out legal struggle against charges of heresy as ethical outworkings of this approach to truth. Central to this exploration is a new annotated translation of Hus's Appeal to Jesus Christ as the Supreme Judge against the pope and canon law. This document was not only a protest against papal power, but expressed a fundamentally new legal situation: in bypassing canon law, it essentially represented a personal claim to freedom of conscience. This unheard-of principle from within the medieval legal framework preceded other related ecclesiastical and legal developments by several centuries. The authors argue that Hus's appeal thus represents a momentous event in church history and European history as a whole. Due to the historical significance of his martyrdom and commemoration by many churches throughout Europe, this book demonstrates that Hus remains an important figure not only for the study of European history, but also for understanding contemporary values of Western civilization.

In Belfast Imaginary: Art and Urban Reinvention, Katharine Keenan argues for the reimagining of place in Belfast, Northern Ireland in the context of Brexit. This deeply researched ethnography depicts the work of artists and policy makers as they imagine and perform a new urban identity for Belfast in the liminal time between the Good Friday Agreement and Brexit.

What do we owe our future children? How do advances in biomedical science bear on these obligations? How do capitalist incentives distort their execution? Advances in biotechnologies for human enhancement and designer babies appear to offer us new hope to control the fragility of human living. Some philosophers have argued that we have a moral imperative to use them, especially to eliminate disabilities. Elyse Purcell offers an opposing view, one guided by existential insights and Marxist reflections. Engineering Perfection: Solidarity, Disability, and Well-being explores the effect global capitalism may have on the selection of traits for our future children and how the commercialization of these technologies may lead to the elimination of bodily diversity. Although philosophers have addressed the possible widening between the haves and have-nots, this book considers the role oppression and exploitation may play in enhancing bodies for profit. As a challenge to the global economy of debility, Purcell proposes the Solidarity view, which embraces human vulnerability and embodied difference. By reflecting on facets of the human condition, the Solidarity view challenges us to reject our conception of the good life as human perfection, and instead reconceive of the good as one's self-realization through the interdependent mutual recognition and co-belonging with others.

On April 12, 1980, a group of soldiers led by Master Sergeant Samuel K. Doe executed a bloody coup that put an end to the Americo-Liberian minority regime in Liberia, transforming Africa's first republic into a military dictatorship. In Liberia under Samuel Doe, 1980-1985: The Politics of Personal Rule, Yekutiel Gershoni examines the evolution and effects of Samuel K. Doe's reign in Liberia. Gershoni shows Doe's path to absolute power, corruption, and dictatorship and the economic crises and political turmoil that ensued, even after his murder in 1990. Liberia under Samuel Doe also examines the role of the United States as Liberia's closest ally, detailing how Doe managed to attract American diplomatic and military support due to U.S. interests in the Cold War. Through in-depth research, primary sources, and interviews with diplomats, politicians, and activists, Gershoni carefully details the timeline of Doe's rise to power and the lasting effects of his dictatorial legacy.

John Dewey was the most celebrated and publicly engaged American philosopher in the twentieth century. His naturalistic theory of ';experience' generated new approaches to education and democracy and re-grounded philosophy's search for truth in the needs of life as it is shared and lived. However, interpretations of Dewey after the linguistic turn have either obscured or rejected the considerable role that he gives to the non-discursive dimension of experience. In Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconscious: The Vital Depths of Experience, Bethany Henning argues that much classical American philosophy implicitly recognizes an unconscious dimension of mind that is distinct from Freud's theory. Although the unconscious that emerges within American thought has never been treated systematically, it found its fullest expression in Dewey's work, particularly in his theory of aesthetic experience. This dimension of mind illuminates the continuity between nature and culture, and it provides us with an account of why artwork is often successful at communicating meanings from the ecological and intimate dimensions of life, where discourse often fails. If the relationship between the human and the organic world has emerged as the definitive question of twenty-first century life, then the aesthetic unconscious stands as a resource for our ecological and intimate well-being.

Using ethnographic research, Willful Ignorance: Overcoming the Limitations of (Christian) Love for Refugees Seeking Asylum examines the attitudes of clergy and lay leaders regarding their (in)attention to racism as it intersects with the harsh reality of U.S. immigration policies and practices. This multi-faceted work begins with a reality check on the scope of forced migration and its intersection with the historical legacy of racism in America, including testimonies from displaced migrants and immigration advocates who help to alleviate state-inflicted suffering at the U.S.-Mexico border. Helen T. Boursier examines the rationales Christian leaders use to justify the local church's nominal response, including the discursive buffers and stall tactics they use to deflect their lack of preaching, teaching, leadership and/or ministry with displaced migrants who are their near neighbors. The Christian church's firm foundation to embody love as social justice provides a historical rebuttal, while case studies of congregations that offer displaced migrants compassionate hospitality model exemplary contemporary response. Closing with practical suggestions for how to begin building bridges with migrants, Boursier argues for a philosophy of religion that embraces resistance to racism and exclusion from asylum, through a missiology of compassion that exemplifies an ecclesiology of love.

This book examines the many ways in which the New Deal revived Texas's economic structure after the 1929 collapse. Ronald Goodwin analyzes how Franklin Roosevelt's initiative, and in particular, the Work Progress Administration, remedied rampant unemployment and homelessness in twentieth-century Texas.

The culture of defense work has undergone significant change over the course of the last twenty years. These changes may have generated confusion and uncertainty concerning the role of the defense lawyer in the modern era. If the lawyer is confused as to his role, is it possible to zealously advance the best interests of his client? While the role of the defense has been explored through the culture of their law firms, the individualized role of the defense lawyer in the context of criminal procedure and their contribution to adversarial justice is something that has not been exposed to scrutiny. This book explores how lawyers view their own individual role in the context of the changed obligations introduced by the CPIA 1996 and the CrimPR, looking at the defense lawyer as part of a system, rather than as part of a relationship. Through a theoretical lens, Ed Johnston provides a wider perspective on the changing nature of criminal justice and the place of a key actor within it to draw conclusions regarding the role of the defense lawyer in the modern era.

Environmental Activism, Social Media, and Protest in China: Becoming Activists over Wild Public Networks builds upon existing social movement scholarship in communication studies, China studies, and sociology by analyzing China's vibrant contemporary environmental protests. Using news reports, social media feeds, and conversations with witnesses and participants in the protests, Elizabeth Brunner examines three important antiparaxylene (PX) protests: the 2007 protests in Xiamen, the 2011 protests in Dalian, and the 2014 protests in Maoming. Brunner argues for the treatment of protests as forces majeure and asserts the legitimacy of wild public networks. Brunner stresses that scholars must take a networked approach to social movements as new media become valid platforms for furthering social change, especially in areas where censorship is common.

This book examines how the Star Trek franchise does more than reflect and depict the political currents of the times. Gonzalez argues that Star Trek also presents an argument as to what constitutes a just, stable, thriving society. By analyzing Star Trek, this book argues that in order to obtain true democracy and justice the productive forces of society must be geared toward achieving a thriving society, the whole individual, and the environment. This dialectic is consonant with the notions of revolutionary change, progress postulated by Karl Marx and examined within this text. The book concludes that the only way to hope to avoid a planetary cataclysm is through justicemore specifically, communism as a concept of justice.

Sam Brownback was the first modern-day conservative to be elected governor of Kansas, the culmination of a rightward shift in the states often-dominant Republican Party. This book is a detailed case study of the policies implemented over his two terms as governor, paying particular attention to the impact on state government and services, the economy, public education, and the business environment. The authors provide extensive background, historical evidence, and detailed references. The books real-world relevance is grounded in a discussion of similar policies in other states as well as the US federal government.

The concept of soft power has caught the attention of policymakers, scholars, and political pundits for the last thirty years. Soft power studies most often focus on measures of public opinion toward a power-wielder and draw conclusions about a state's level of soft power from that opinion. This research examines soft power influence by focusing on the elite discourse and the foreign policy decisions of states that are the target of soft power influence. Beginning with Joseph Nye's conception that soft power is an attractive force that influences state policy decisions and its level of support for another state's policies, Confronting the Myth of Soft Power in U.S. Foreign Policy examines whether U.S. soft power was part of key policymakers' decision calculus. Soft power is tested against two plausible alternate explanationsbalancing and state identity. Data from the discourse of key foreign policymakers in France and Germany indicate that U.S. soft power does not account for those states' policy decisions to support U.S.-led policy interventions in Kosovo in 1999, or against ISIS in 2014. The results of this research are suggestive regarding the potential of soft power influence and its implications on scholarship and U.S. foreign policymaking.

Based closely in spirit upon the most recent development in prosodic studies, Verbal Transformation, Despair, and Hope in The Waste Land attempts another round of ';philosophical investigation'. The book demonstrates how The Waste Land could be read afresh in terms of the hidden verbal transformation that reveals the overlooked performative and collaborative nature of language. This verbal transformation makes The Waste Land flow naturally as truly ';rhythmical creation of [meaningful] beauty' the way Poe defines poetry, especially through what Eliot calls ';auditory imagination' or what Herder calls ';intermediary sensation' that makes the poetry ';the first language' of humanity or ';the dictionary of the soul.' The verbal transformation also serendipitously makes sounds of despair the sounds of hope.

Despite the end of the Cold War, the frequency of U.S. military intervention has increased. While military intervention accelerated after 9/11, increasing intervention was demonstrably evident well before 2001. Presidential Decision Making and Military Intervention in the PostCold War Era: Go or No-Go analyzes presidential decision making regarding military intervention through a focused, structured comparison of ';go' and ';no-go' decisions from the four successive administrations of Presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Dennis Ricci explores competing explanations for why a presidential administration will decide to intervene in one situation and not in another. Since both the situations and decision makers vary across cases, Ricci analyzes explanations for intervention by asking: Why intervene? Why use force or not? Under what conditions or circumstances are intervention decisions made?

The Arc of the Covenant studies the social, cultural, and political factors that contributed to exceptional Jewish educational success in St. Paul, Minnesota in the latter half of the twentieth century. The book draws on archival sources, interviews with principal figures, and wide-ranging research on Jewish education and community dynamics to elucidate the story's intriguing improbabilities. Why such success in a midsize, midcentury, midwestern river town with a relatively small Jewish population of limited resources? How did it happen, and how have circumstances changed in recent years? The answers are to be found at the intersection of broad historical forces and local circumstances. Though focused on a particular place and time, the implications reach far beyond St. Paul, then and now, making Arc of the Covenant a timely resource for current Jewish educational planners, along with educators in other communities dedicated to the transmission of a sacred heritage.

The millennial generation is unique in various ways, particularly with regard to their career aspirations and expectations. Due to their reputation as ';job hoppers,' recruiting millennials is not enough. Retention of a millennial workforce is imperative for organizational success and longevity. This book explores the expectations held by millennials and the ways in which they differ from those of past generations. It covers a broad range of topics including onboarding, work/life balance, stress, retention after a crisis, boredom, internships, and how employers can best leverage mobile platforms for increased engagement.

This book analyzes the etiology of child rape in Ghana within the framework of rape culture. By applying feminist perspectives and psychological theories to laws in Ghana to protect children against sexual abuse, this book creates room for both victims and perpetrators to tell their stories while also incorporating the views of the public through a textual analysis of reader comments on child rape in the nation's newspapers. The presentation of both victims' and perpetrators' perspectives is done with the goal of drawing attention to the pervasiveness of child rape in Ghanaian society and to provide a lens through which we can detect potentially dangerous situations that can lead to child molestation in our homes and communities, revealing lapses in social organization and interactions that make child rape possible.

This book chronicles the professional life of a career-long, inclusive educator in New York City through eight different stages in special and general education. Developing a new approach to research as part of qualitative methodology, David J. Connor merges the academic genre of autoethnography with memoir to create a narrative that engages the reader through stories of personal experiences within the professional world that politicized him as an educator. After each chapter's narrative, a systematic analytic commentary follows that focuses on: teaching and learning in schools and universities; the influence of educational laws; specific models of disability and how influence educators and educational researchers; and educational structures and systemsincluding their impact on social, political, and cultural experiences of people with disabilities. This autoethnographic memoir documents, over three decades, the relationship between special and general education, the growth of the inclusion movement, and the challenge of special education as a discrete academic field. As part of a national group of critical special educators, Connor describes the growth of counter-theory through the inception and subsequent growth of DSE as a viable academic field, and the importance of rethinking human differences in new ways.

This book examines Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Miles Davis as distinctively global symbols of threatening and nonthreatening black masculinity. It centers them in debates over U.S. cultural exceptionalism, noting how they have been part of the definition of jazz as a jingoistic and exclusively American form of popular culture.

This book contends that the transition of leadership from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will result in a crisis of legitimacy for the Islamic Republic of Iran. Using Max Weber's typology of legitimacy, the book explains that the Islamic Republic's legitimacy was based on the charismatic authority of the regime's founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Since Khomeini's death in 1989, the regime has failed to develop the rule of law necessary for legal-rational authority. Moreover, it abandoned the logical underpinnings justifying clerical rule when a mid-ranking cleric rather than a Grand Ayatollah was placed in the position of Supreme Leader. With neither a legal basis nor a traditional basis of authority, the new leader relied extensively on the cover of Khomeini's charismatic shadow for legitimacy. After nearly four decades, this shadow is fading. Not only will Khamenei's successor lack the same direct ties to Khomeini, but the demographic and societal changes in Iran have made the charisma of Khomeini a historical concept rather than a viscerally felt experience. First the book analyzes the likely succession scenarios, finding the most probable outcome is the appointment of a hardline conservative backed by the regime's security forces. Next, the regime's economic, political, and social failures are presented, in order to explain why the new leader is likely to try to return to a traditional basis of legitimacy religion. Thereafter, the book explains how this hardliner focus on religion is likely to result in an aggressive Iranian foreign policy toward the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, impacting the region's security.

This book offers a detailed analysis of the history of female musicians in the Highlife music tradition of the Republic of Ghana, particularly the challenges and constraints these women faced and overcame. Highlife a form of West African music infusing Ghana's traditional Akan dance rhythms and melodies with European instruments and harmonies grew in popularity throughout the 20th century and hit its peak in the 1970s and 1980s. Although women played significant roles in the evolution and survival of the genre, few of their contributions have been thoroughly explored or documented. Despite being disregarded and ignored in many spheres, female Highlife musicians thrived and became trailblazers in the Ghanaian music industry, making particularly vibrant contributions to Highlife music in the 1970s. This book presents the voices of female Highlife artists and documents the ideological transformations expressed through their musical works, exploring the challenges they confronted throughout their musical careers and their contributions to music and culture in Ghana.

Focusing on the NAACP's twentieth-century attempt to overturn the ';separate but equal' doctrine through school desegregation cases, Desegregation and the Rhetorical Fight for African American Citizenship Rights analyzes the rhetorical/legal dynamics inherent in the struggle to determine African American citizenship rights. This book begins by identifying the fundamental dialectical tension existing within all American citizenship rights between the Declaration of Independence's guarantee of ';ideal equality' to all citizens as opposed to the Constitution's privileging of local, ';practical' decision-making through Article IV Sect. 2, the ';privileges and immunities' clause. It contends that as a consequence of that dynamic, American citizenship rights are rhetorical concepts produced through argument grounded in ';all the available means of persuasion,' including logical, emotional, and ethical appeals. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the school desegregation issue came down to a question of credibility/ethics. Recommended for scholars interested in communication, law, history, political science, and cultural studies.

This book sheds light on experiences relatively underrepresented in academic and non-academic sport history. It examines how Asian and Pacific Islander peoples used American football to maintain a sense of community while encountering racial exclusion, labor exploitation, and colonialism. Through their participation and spectatorship in American football, Asian and Pacific Islander people crossed treacherous cultural frontiers to construct what sociologist Elijah Anderson has called a cosmopolitan canopy under which Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and people of diverse racial and ethnic identities interacted with at least a semblance of respect and equity. And perhaps a surprising number of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have excelled in college and even professional football before the 1960s. Finally, acknowledging the impressive influx of elite Pacific Islander gridders who surfaced in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, it is vital to note as well the racialized nativism shadowing the lives of these athletes.

The following book explores the intertextual relationship between Paul Auster's first and most remarkable work, The New York Trilogy (1987), and the works of certain American and European writers who shaped this novel and Auster's future works. Auster's The New York Trilogy is a novel formed by an intertextual dialogue which in some cases it is explicit, mentioning authors and books intentionally, and in others implicit, provoked by Auster's admiration for authors such as Samuel Beckett or product of his role as a translator, as it occurs with Maurice Blanchot. These two different ways of intertextuality essentially show Auster's influence of the American Renaissance, Samuel Beckett's fiction and the work of the writer and critic Maurice Blanchot. In these terms, this book proposes an exhaustive analysis of City of Glass and Herman Melville's ';Bartleby, the Scrivener,' Ghosts and Edgar Allan Poe's ';William Wilson' and The Locked Room and Nathaniel Hawthorne's Fanshawe. The two last chapters also offer a thorough analysis of the whole trilogy in comparison to Samuel Beckett's trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable and finally introduces a study of the trilogy as a fictionalization of Maurice Blanchot's literary theory.

Many countries throughout Latin America have experienced high levels of corruption, drug trafficking, and violence, which has created elements of fragility. The book is comprises case studies that explore the nature of violence in countries throughout the region. Moreover, it seeks to address some of the ways in which governments have sought to address violence. The cases examined in this volume are quite diverse, illustrating different types of violence as all of the countries in Latin America are not the same. Countries like Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico have high levels of drug trafficking and organized crime. Strategies designed to combat drug trafficking organization, particularly in Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil, and counter-gang strategies in Central America have help foment violence as these various criminal organizations have responded to such government policies. Yet other countries, like Peru and Bolivia, have much lower levels of violence. However, the perception of insecurity is quite high despite the fact that Peru has one of the lower homicide rates in the country. On the other hand, the nature of violence in Bolivia is quite different. This country does not have a homicide rate like El Salvador, but the country has witnessed public lynchings and other forms of violence. This volume is an effort to better understand the major trends in political violence in this particularly violent region.

This book explores the ways Christian women in college make sense of bisexual, transgender, polyamorous, and atheist others. Specifically, it explores the ways they express tolerance for some sexual groups, such as lesbian and gay people, while maintaining condemnation of other sexual, gendered, or religious groups. In so doing, this book highlights the limits of Christian tolerance for the advancement of minority rights.

In 2009 Iran witnessed the Green Movement, a popular uprising that challenged the status quo of the socio-political structures of the Islamic Republic. This movement which pre-dates the Arab Spring uprisings in the region, drove large numbers of Iranian citizens to the streets, reminiscent of the 1979 revolution, protesting the presidential election results. This book investigates the impact of the political communications of the leaders of the uprising, namely Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Zahra Rahnavard and Hojatol Islam Mehdi Karoubi, on the movement. Although the Green Movement was ultimately unsuccessful, it produced valuable data for studying political uprisings and the role of social media in facilitating articulations of dissent, especially in the Middle East. This work is particularly significant since the cycle of protests surfaced again in 2017-2018 and Iran was yet again embroiled in violent dissent. This book provides a historical link between the political discourse of Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the current regime, and that of the leaders of the Green Movement. Such historical approach facilitates an understanding of the impact and implication of speech on key Iranian uprisings since the revolution of 1979. In other words, this book asks was the discourse of the leaders of the Green Movement oriented towards building bridges or systematically distorted communication oriented to electoral success?This work successfully tests the viability of a constellation of critical and cultural theories in the Iranian context. More specifically Jurgen Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action, his conception of the Public Sphere as well as Anthony Giddens Theory of Structuration serve as the theoretical foundations of this inquiry. Furthermore, this book takes the unique approach of analysing YouTube videos of the protests, for the counter hegemonic role played by this social media platform as well its broadcast capabilities in authoritarian regimes where mass media are in the service of the ruling class. This study takes a Critical Discourse Analysis approach to analyse the collected data. The investigation uncovers evidence of systematic communication distortion in the public discourse of both Ayatollah Khomeini and the leaders of the Green Movement and discusses the impact of said distortions on the direction and shaping of the movement. This book also offers a brief analysis of the 2018 protests in comparison with Green Movement and explores ways to unify the nation and move forward.

American Roma: A Modern Investigation of Lived Experiences and Media Portrayals explores the representation of American Roma from the nineteenth-century to today by examining portrayals in newsprint, television, movies, and social media. The lived experiences of American Roma are considered through the lens of twenty-three Roma men and women who live across the United States. Their stories highlight experiences across almost a hundred years of life in the United States and are compared with narratives collected from European Roma lives. Their narratives catalogue the extreme prejudice they have encountered in America and the struggles they have faced economically, socially, and educationally. Their narratives highlight their involvement in the civil rights movement, a history of fighting for equality under discriminatory laws, and unfair treatment by law enforcement. The role of Roma women in the fight for equality is also highlighted as readers come to understand their position at the intersection of ethnicity and gender. This book is a new look at Roma ethnicity explored from the perspective of the American Roma about American Roma.