Books published by Lexington Books

Climate Change Education: Reimagining the Future with Alternative Forms of Storytelling offers innovative approaches to teaching about climate change through storytelling forms that appeal to today's students--climate fiction and protest poetry, fiction and documentary films, video games and social media. The stories are used as exemplars, from exploring space debris to urban design planning to fast fashion, and they provide entry points for investigating particular aspects of climate science, including the local and global impacts of a warming planet. Each chapter provides analyses and strategies for fostering climate (and space) literacy through knowledge, empathy, and agency. Contributors from around the world encourage educators to answer students' calls for comprehensive K-12 climate education by aligning pedagogy with real-world challenges in order to prepare students who understand the myriad injustices of the climate crisis and feel empowered to confront them. They share their own stories and urge educators to join the growing, hopeful movement for action, classroom by classroom.

Rabindrinath Tagore (18611941) and Amartya Sen (1933) defend a distinctive form of foreign policy internationalism in their writings. Instead of increasing the economic and military power of democratic states relative to their authoritarian competitors, Tagore and Sen focus on the need to diminish the capacity for violence in all states, regardless of regime type. In Sen's view, a program of nuclear disarmament, a coordinated reduction in global military spending, and a coordinated reduction in the global arms trade should be woven into international law. This book argues that the distance between Tagore and Sen's foreign policy recommendations and the policies pursued by the leading states in the international system is better understood when it is viewed in terms of the early Indian classical period. In particular, the idea that violent actions lead to violent responsesand are therefore both immoral and imprudentis prominently expressed in the early Buddhist Discourses and the Ashokan inscriptions as well as the writings of Tagore and Sen. The ethical standard of the obligations of power articulated by Tagore and Sen provides a better foundation for thinking about human security than the social contract tradition.

This volume explores and engages with the key thinkers and ideas of the Austrian School of economics to better understand how individuals coordinate their separate interests in a peaceful and productive manner by unintentionally forming not only market prices but also rules, customs, cultural norms and other institutional arrangements that allow specialization and trade. Together, these dynamics generate a market order by ameliorating the potential for social conflict, and, in turn, facilitate the conditions for social cooperation and specialization under the division of labor. The diversity in topics and approaches will make the volume of interest to readers in a variety of fields, including anthropology, economics, entrepreneurship, history, philosophy, political science, and public policy.

Legacies of Departed African Women Writers: Matrix of Creativity and Power proffers varied perspectives of the invaluable contributions of ten deceased African writers from all across Africa who have cleared the path to a vibrant African feminist arena. The dynamics of change gleaned from both their textual and contextual concerns unarguably set the pace for contemporary African women writers who have striven to follow in the footsteps of their literary mothers as well as their oral foremothers. This book, edited by Helen Chukwuma and Chioma Carol Opara, shows the collective testament of ample creativity and power generated by these departed heroes: Flora Nwapa, Mariama Ba, Grace Ogot, Zulu Sofola, Bessie Head, Buchi Emecheta, Nawal El Saadawi, Assia Djebar, Yvonne Vera, and Nadine Gordimer. These chapters revolve around the positive impact of the celebrated writers on creative writing, theoretical formulations, and socio-cultural change. The contributors argue that these corpuses of works have illuminated creativity rooted in power, vision, and freedom.

Violence, Trauma, and Memory: Responses to War in the Late Medieval and Early Modern World brings together eight essays that examine medieval and early modern violence and warfare in France, the Hispanic World, and the Dutch Republic through the lens of trauma studies and memory studies. By focusing on warfare, these essays by historians, literary specialists, and historians of visual culture demonstrate how individuals and groups living with the ';ungraspable' outcomes of wartime violence grappled with processing and remembering (both culturally and politically) the trauma of war.

What is an American? Bruce P. Frohnen and Ted V. McAllister argue that we are, in fact, a distinct people with our own common character that transcends race, gender, ethnicity, and class. They find in our current political conflicts a crisis of identity that stems from changes, not just in our political, economic, and technological environment, but in our ability to evaluate--and to value--the personalities that shaped our way of life. The history of the American character is filled with triumph as well as tragedy, and with virtue as well as vice. It is a story of cooperation and conflict among an unruly people, who from earliest days questioned authority even as they worked to establish communities of faith, family, and local freedom under extreme circumstances.

In Opera as Art: Philosophical Sketches, Paul Thom argues for opera as an art, standing alongside other artforms that employ visual and sonic media to embody the great themes of human life. Thom contends that in great operatic art, the narrative and expressive content collaborate with the works aesthetic qualities towards achieving this aim. This argument can be extended to modern operatic productions. At their best, these stagings are works of art in themselves, whether they give faithful renditions of the operas they stage and whether their aims go beyond interpretation to commentary and critique. This book is a philosophical introduction to the key practices that comprise the world of opera: the making of the work; its interpretation by directors, critics, and spectators; and the making of an operatic production. Opera has always existed in a context of philosophical ideas, and this book is written for opera-lovers who would like to learn something about that philosophical context.

The Emerging Role of Geomedia in the Environmental Humanities, edited by Mark Terry and Michael Hewson, provides the latest scholarship on the various methods and approaches being used by environmental humanists to incorporate geomedia into their research and analyses. Chapters in the book examine such applications as geographic information systems, global positioning systems, geo-doc filmmaking, and related geo-locative systems all being used as new technologies of research and analysis in investigations in the environmental humanities. The contributors also explore how these new methodologies impact the production of knowledge in this field of study as well as promote the impact of First Nation people perspectives.

Little research or curriculum design has been done for the purpose of improving juvenile postsecondary correctional education and limiting recidivism rates of students in the juvenile justice system. Using short fictive narratives and poetry by currently and formerly incarcerated juveniles, Critical Pedagogical Narratives of Long-Term Incarcerated Juveniles: Humanizing the Dehumanized provides an in-depth look at influences that affect their trajectory on the School to Prison Pipeline, and how their experiences interrelate with their educational experience. Gregory Barraza takes a critical look at the absence of one of the most important elements to juvenile justice education often gets overlooked: humanization of the dehumanized. So often, students on the school to prison pipeline and in juvenile justice education fall into the most marginalized sector of education. They are frequently overlooked regarding mental health services and academic services. This book shows that our justice impacted juveniles have a voice and have needs that go overlooked. The students' voice gives insight on the students' life experience and how that experience led them to correctional education. Once we know their "voice" we can give them the necessary educational path that deters from recidivism and a "doing life one day at a time."

Social Media Ethics and COVID-19: Well-Being, Truth, Misinformation and Authenticity explores ways that some of the best and worst moments of the pandemic resulted from the interconnection of social media and ethics. The ethical challenges social media poses for corporate providers, government officials, and users existed well before the outbreak of COVID-19: What responsibility do corporate providers bear for inaccurate information posted by users? What responsibility do users bear? In this "post-truth" and polarized world, who defines "accurate information"? During the height of the COVID-19 crisis, public health agencies, emergency management agencies, and traditional news media used social media to disseminate or to track information, while users found communities for shared values or experiences. At the same time, users posted and amplified inaccurate or misleading scientific and health information, engaged in hate, and escalated conspiracy theories that have proven detrimental to the public health response to COVID-19. Edited by Pamela A. Zeiser and Berrin A. Beasley, this collection brings together work from leading scholars in communication, English, philosophy, and political science to examine the ethical use of social media during COVID-19, offering both a multidisciplinary understanding of the subject and tools for managing the challenges found at the intersection of social media, ethics, and COVID-19.

There is a paucity of material regarding how choral music specifically was performed in the 1800s. The Historically Informed Performance (HIP) movement has made remarkable advancements in choral music of the Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical periods, with modest forays into the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and other early nineteenth-century composers; however, there are no sources with a comprehensive examination of how choral music was performed. Using more than one-hundred musical examples, illustrations, tables, and photographs and relying on influential, contemporaneous sources, David Friddle details the performance practices of the time, including expressive devices such as articulation, ornamentation, phrasing, tempo, and vibrato, along with an in-depth discussion of period pronunciation, instruments, and orchestral/choral placement. Sing Romantic Music Romantically: Nineteenth-Century Choral Performance Practices fills a gap in choral scholarship and moves forward our knowledge of how choral music sounded and was performed in the nineteenth century. The depth of research and abundance of source material makes this work a must-have for choral professionals everywhere.

Choral Treatises and Singing Societies in the Romantic Age charts the interrelated beginning and development of choral methods and community choruses beginning in the early nineteenth century. Using more than one-hundred musical examples, illustrations, tables, and photographs to document this phenomenon, author David Friddle writes persuasively about this unusual tandem expansion. Beginning in 1781, with the establishment of the first secular singing group in Germany, Friddle shows how as more and more choral ensembles were founded throughout Germany, then Europe, Scandinavia, and North America, the need for singing treatises quickly became apparent. Music pedagogues Hans Georg Ngeli, Michael Traugott Pfeiffer, and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi invented the genre that became modern choral methods; initially these books were combinations of music fundamental primers, with frequent inclusion of choral works intended for performance. Eventually authors branched out into choral conducting textbooks, detailed instructions on how to found such a community-based organization, and eventually classroom music instruction. The author argues that one of the greatest legacies of this movement was the introduction of vocal music education into public schools, which led to greater musical literacy as well as the proliferation of volunteer choirs. All modern choral professionals can find the roots their career during this century.

Ecopoetics of Reenchantment: Liminal Realism and Poetic Echoes of the Earth tackles the reenchantment process at work in a part of contemporary ecoliterature that is marked by the resurfacing of the song of the earth topos and of Gaia images. Focusing on the postmodernist braiding of various indigenous and ecofeminist ontologies, close readings of the animistic and totemic dimensions of the stories at hand lead to the theorizing of liminal realism--a mode that shares much with magical realism but that is approached through an ecopoetic lens, specifically working an interspecies kind of magic, situating readers in-between human and other-than-human worlds. This book promotes a worldview based on relationships of reciprocity and symbiosis. It restores our capacity for wonder together with our sensitive intelligence. Liminal realism adopts a stance in-between scientific, mythical, and poetic worldviews as it calls attention to the soundscapes, odorscapes, feelscapes, and landscapes of the world. This monograph offers an original transdisciplinary and cross-Atlantic take on ecopoetics as it straddles the two academic worlds and sparks a conversation between artworks, theories, and studies emerging from the English-speaking world as well as from Francophone contexts.Entangling the materiality of language back within the flesh of the world, this book and the texts under study provide insight into the fundamentally sympoietic dimension of ecopoiesis.

Lynching in American Literature and Journalism consists of twelve essays investigating the history and development of writing about lynching as an American tragedy and the ugliest element of national character. According to the Tuskegee Institute, 4,743 people were lynched between 1882 and 1968 in the United States, including 3,446 African Americans and 1,297 European Americans. More than 73 percent of the lynchings in the Civil War period occurred in the Southern states. The Lynchings increased dramatically in the aftermath of the Reconstruction, after slavery had been abolished and free men gained the right to vote. The peak of lynching occurred in 1882, after Southern white Democrats had regained control of the state legislators. This book is a collection of historical and critical discussions of lynching in America that reflects the shameful, unmoral policies, and explores the topic of lynching within American history, literature, and journalism.

Historically, Afro-Latinos/as have been underrepresented in political offices in the District of Columbia. Isreal G. Mallard explores the social/racial factors that influence the political attitudes of Afro-Latino/a voters, the Latino voting community at-large, and political representatives. Also, the author examines factors such as ethnicity and "pigmentocracy" (skin color) which play a role in electing an Afro-Latino/a to political office in Washington, D.C. Furthermore, he provides answers to address the social/racial factors that influence the electability of light-skin and dark-skin, self-identified Afro-Latinos/as running for political office in Washington, D.C. In addition, he discusses how social/racial factors influence the pathway to political office for self-identified Afro-Latinos/as. He uses a qualitative methodological approach which includes interview participants to provide answers to this study.

A 2023 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic TitleOverworked and Undervalued: Black Women and Success in America is a collection of essays written by Black female scholars, educators, and students as well as public policy, behavioral, and mental health professionals. The contributors' share their experiences and frustrations with White America which continues to demand excessive labor and one-sided relationships of Black women while it simultaneously diminishes them. The book describes the ongoing struggle for women of color in general, but Black women in particular, which derives from the experience that only certain parts of our identities are deemed acceptable. The essays reflect on the events of the last few years and the toll the related stress has taken on each author. As a whole, the book offers its readers an opportunity to gain insight into these women's experiences and to find their place in supporting the Black women in their lives.

Ubiquitous triple consciousness frameworks address the limitations of W.E.B Du Bois' seminal double consciousness concept by emphasizing a third gendered lens, a definite consciousness that legitimizes the rich complexities of the black American female experience.In The Affirmative Discomforts of Black Female Authorship: Rethinking Triple Consciousness in Contemporary American Culture, the author rethinks this methodology by examining an interesting assemblage of contemporary black female authors (Roxane Gay, Beyoncé and Issa Rae) across four disciplines (history, literature, music and television) whose contemporary multimedia works are engaging with a third lens the author conceptualizes as rupture.This rupture, a simultaneous embrace and rejection of racial and gendered experiences that are affirmative but also contradictory, unsettling and ultimately unresolved, problematizes hegemonic notions of identity and boldly moves towards a potential shift, a shift on the cusp of profound rethinking and reimagination.

A Cultural History of Modern Korean Literature: The Birth of Oppa examines the cultural and social impact of Japanese colonialism and modernity on the wider aspects of everyday life in Korea. Selected as an outstanding work in 2004 by the National Academy of Sciences in South Korea, is by any measure a remarkable work. Lee considers a wide range of literary and cultural texts, exploring significant historical moments and phenomena while critically assessing personal experience and social life, mainly how modernity, colonialism, and total war shaped national and cultural identities. This text also reflects the complex and refractory legacy of Japanese colonialism and modernity. Lee's foray into the complex relationships between Korea, Japan, and the West offers a thoroughly engaging study of the origins of modern Korean culture and society during the first half of the 20th century. The first of its kind, Lee offers a richly vivid portrait of a rapidly changing landscape, fueled by modernity and technology, one that will appeal to general readers and students alike.

A Treatise in Phenomenological Sociology: Object, Method, Findings, and Applications provides the first systematic approach to phenomenological sociology. Carlos Belvedere claims that phenomenological sociology is a distinctive paradigm endowed with its peculiar object, method, and stock of knowledge. He defines phenomenological sociology as a science dealing with the natural attitude of groups. When it comes to its method, he describes the actual, centenary use of the epoché, the eidetic variation, and constitutional analysis in the practice of classical and contemporary social thinkers. Finally, he collects a wealth of precious findings in the history of phenomenological sociology, which starts with the ego agens as the substratum of social life, then goes on to consider higher level strata such as pragmata, habitualities, social personalities, and institutions. He argues that social behavior can take different forms, subjective as well as objective, because it can experience a wide range of transformations thanks to specific qualities of pragmata, such as reiterableness and transferability.

This book explicates how many films intersect black suffering and God-talk in ways that instantiate secular limitations to divine efficacy. The book's concept of a modern God introduces a new method of analysis that reimagines theodical discourses as mechanisms of modern identities and filmmakers as skillful exegetes who recalibrate divine attributes to the sensemaking cadences of their contemporaries. Shayne Lee demonstrates how cinematic theodicy navigates a happy medium between affirming divine benevolence and sidelining supernatural activity and that filmic characters, like their real-world counterparts, are quite clever at triangulating rationality, faith, and tragedy. In addition to positing synergistic links between theodicy and secularity, Lee offers critical insights into cinema's relevance to the sociology of evil by specifying how films code and narrate malevolent actions and outcomes, demarcate clear lines of distinction between victims and perpetrators, clarify societal dynamics driving inequality and oppression, and transform individual episodes of suffering into collective and memorialized identities of trauma. This book illuminates how filmic treatments of theodicy construct evil and suffering in calculated ways that connect specific acts, effects, and institutions to greater structures of meaning.

This book provides new answers to who and psychologically why individuals sometimes adopt conspiracy beliefs and thoughts of violence. Five conspiracy beliefs are considered: Government Malfeasance, Malevolent World Power, Extra-terrestrial Cover-up, Personal Well-being Threat, and Control of Information. Using a survey of 977 US citizens, the book compares thirteen possible demographic characteristics (who?) to see which ones are most associated with extreme beliefs. The book then evaluates a three-step psychological sequence (why?) in which individuals experiencing intense life stressors (health, money, or loneliness), combined with powerlessness (displayed as PTSD symptoms), have increased risk for extreme beliefs, perhaps because they offer a sense of understanding, strength, and community.

This work explores the long-term evolutionary implications of the "Mobility Imperative: " the foundational nature of mobility for human beings and their societies. The author puts forward a parsimonious but comprehensive model based on Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) rationales. The selected case studies range from the emergence and expansion of humans to cattle domestication and beyond.

The past few decades have witnessed a proliferation of economic sanctions, yet there seem to be few examples of sanctions meeting sender states' goals. Under what conditions do sanctions fail to change the behavior of so-called international "pariah states," countries who violate various international norms? This book examines the impact of economic sanctions on target states' trading relationships through social network analysis, a method that has rarely been applied to the study of sanctions. Drawing on UN Comtrade data, Trading with Pariahs: Trade Networks and the Failure of Economic Sanctions shows that the imposition of sanctions can drastically change some states' trading networks, as states either find new trading partners (in the case of North Korea) or feel the sting of the sanctions from key trading partners (like Iran). Trading networks (such as Myanmar's) remain relatively stable over time as key trading partners refuse to impose sanctions. Through the theory of weaponized interdependence, Keith A. Preble and Charmaine N. Willis argue that the success or failure of sanctions to change target states' behavior depends on who imposes the sanctions. Sanctions imposed by the "right" sender states can be successful but also cannot rely solely on policies of isolation to achieve the goals of the sanctions.

D.H. Lawrence's Final Fictions: A Lacanian Perspective explores how literature thinks; more specifically, how the reading of fiction influences behavior. Lawrence writes passionately about our alienation from ourselves, from other people, and from the cosmos. He believes that we need to heed the voices of our unconscious, and he shows us how to meld body and mind so that, psychoanalytically speaking, Id and Ego can come together. In this endeavor there is a salient convergence between Lawrences writings and those of Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst.In this book, Stoltzfus examines the poetics of seven major fictions that Lawrence wrote between 1925 and 1930, five productive years that are referred to as his fabulation period. In each of the books seven chapters, in tandem with Lacans writings, Stoltzfus analyzes seven major characters, four of whom move from alienation to the renewal of self and the cosmos. He argues that Lawrences fiction is simultaneously descriptive and prescriptive by showing us how to circumvent dysfunction. Stoltzfus brings literature and psychoanalysis together in readings that are both aesthetic and epistemological. They are recipes for curing the Anthropocene.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities were established to provide the opportunity for higher education to people of African descent in the era of segregation. The visions, values, and heritages these schools embodied enabled them to chart new frontiers of learning, scholarship, and public engagement for and beyond the United States. Historically Black Colleges and Universities in a Globalizing World: The Past, the Present, and the Future, edited by Alem Hailu, Mohamed S. Camara, and Sabella O. Abidde examines the history and contribution of these institutions in the broader national and global sociopolitical context of the changes taking place in the nation and the world. Collectively, the contributors offer reflections and visions by both looking back and forward to find viable answers to the challenges and opportunities HBCUs face in the new century and beyond. They argue that as the world convulses by the new global dynamics of emerging pandemics, economic dislocations, and resource constraints, HBCUs are uniquely positioned to meet these challenges.

The Russian Revolution is typically studied from a perspective of power and authority. The shadow of Communism tends to portray the revolutionary character of 1917 as an ominous path toward totalitarianism. While the revolutionary story has been overshadowed by the authoritarianism of Stalinist regimes, the Revolution has much more complex underpinnings that tie back to the nineteenth century Russian populist movement and the women who were drawn into it. Nadezhda Krupskaya and the New View of Radical Society in Russia reexamines the fundamental ideas and moments that led to the revolution and its eventual bureaucratization from the perspective of Nadezhda Krupskaya, Vladimir Lenin's wife. Her involvement provides a new perspective in how we should consider the role of culture as opposed to ideology, particularly the subordination of Communism, as well as the women in Soviet politics. M.A. Iasilli provides a nuanced view of the Russian Revolution that demonstrates a Bolshevik legacy and connection with their populist ancestors, the Narodniks, and argues that the revolution wasn't merely Marxist fanaticism but something much deeper and emotional.

In this book, Mads Møller T. Andersen examines the methodological challenges that arise when studying creativity and creative processes in media industries, arguing that the field of media studies still has much to learn about how these industries facilitate their own creative processes. Andersen introduces and utilizes a theoretical framework of five traditions in creativity to guide readers through five different methods of approaching and understanding the concept of creativity, exploring whether media scholars should abandon current, romantic understandings of creativity in favor of more progressive and nuanced definitions. Ultimately, Andersen considers and offers examples of how, as a discipline, we can design studies of creative processes that also address what we still don't know about creativity in these contexts. Scholars interested in media studies, cultural studies, and research methods will find this book particularly useful.

The Malay Nobat: A History of Power, Acculturation, and Sovereignty explores the history and meaning of the nobat, a court ensemble that has performed music for courts in Malaysia and Brunei with roots in the Islamicate world since Abbassid times. Raja Iskandar Bin Raja Halid examines the nobat spread throughout the Muslim empire and its emergence as a symbol of power and sovereignty. The author argues that the nobat was an important symbol of Muslim power and analyzes the effect of the nobat's appropriation by colonial powers and of its induction as part of an invented tradition in the process of nation-building a modern Malay state. The author ultimately shows how existing nobat ensembles are the last living musical legacy of the Muslim world.