Books published by Lexington Books

This book looks at the controversial issues surrounding the desire for titles (both earned and unearned) in Zimbabwe and beyond. The desire for titles is often associated with the quest for status, power, class, and recognition. Unfortunately, the result of this desire and greed for titles means you can no longer tell genuine PhDs from fake ones. The unscrupulous quest for fake degrees is regarded in this book as "Titlemania or Taitolomania". The scramble for titles has not spared community leaders across the divide. Of concern is the failure by High Degrees students to use their earned titles to solve societal problems through national technological development. The book provokes debate on whether or not Africa in general, and Zimbabwe in particular, need more doctorates, considering that most PhD holders are not contributing to national development, production of goods and services, and the improvement of societal conditions.

Contextuality of Healthcare Choices in Pakistan analyzes the contextual factors shaping healthcare decision-making in Pakistan. Divided into three thematic areas--contextuality of healthcare choices, power dynamics and the health of the marginalized, and emerging challenges and healthcare response--the book explores the complex interplay of social, cultural, and institutional influences on health-seeking behaviors.The book examines the nuanced fabric of healthcare decision-making in Pakistan through a series of nine meticulously crafted chapters. From the influence of geography and social context on health-related choices to the power dynamics inherent in patient-doctor interactions, each chapter offers valuable insights into the myriad factors shaping individuals' healthcare decisions. Moreover, the book sheds light on overlooked aspects of healthcare decision-making, including the experiences of marginalized communities such as the transgender population and individuals seeking mental healthcare.Drawing on diverse theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence, this book challenges simplistic notions of healthcare decision-making as solely individual and rational. Instead, it argues for a comprehensive understanding of how communal, social, and institutional factors intersect to shape health-seeking behaviors. By illuminating the contextual complexities inherent in healthcare decision-making, this book offers invaluable insights for researchers, policymakers, healthcare professionals, and the wider public interested in understanding and improving healthcare outcomes in Pakistan.

Linking broad-based public service to post-secondary education is the best way to make our society more free. Access to college ought to be a social right of citizenship. The core idea in T.H. Marshall's concept of social citizenship is that, in addition to civil and political rights, people hold social rights, including guarantees to housing, health care, basic income, and, especially, an adequate education. These are resources we all need to participate in society as full and equal members. In America, opponents of these guarantees have effectively mobilized deeply held liberal ideas, arguing that state action is a threat to freedom. Against this, progressive arguments about fairness have fallen flat. Looking outside liberalism, this book offers a new approach. It argues, first, the civic republican tradition provides an authentically American basis for the social rights of citizenship. Republicanism understands that true freedom requires a degree of personal independence. The ultimate justification for egalitarian policies, especially in education, is that they make us more free. Second, our first major policy step in this direction ought to be adopting a large-scale service-to-school program designed to increase access to post-secondary education.

Walls profoundly shape the spaces we live in and the places we move through. They impinge on our everyday lives, entangling power relations, identity, and hierarchies. Lisa-Jo K. van den Scott examines this phenomenon in the context of housing in Arviat, Nunavut. Inuit in Arviat, Arviammiut, have only been living in permanent housing since the late 1950s and early 1960s. Van den Scott's ethnography of the contemporary lived experience of Arviammiut within their houses acknowledges colonial power relations within the very walls of their houses; an uncomfortable living arrangement, which Arviammiut navigate in resilient and heterogeneous ways. Having lived in Arviat for five years, van den Scott finds that the walls represent a Western presence in Arviammiut lives. In essence, Arviammiut are living in a foreign space which reflects as well as impacts their experiences. Walls have profoundly changed Inuit life; however, Inuit also exercise agency in how they form relationships with those walls. Van den Scott lays out the social processes inherent to their experience, such as spatial fusion, the process of symbolically connecting separate interior spaces. In doing so, she argues that walls are boundary objects, cultural objects, and technological objects. Essentially, she introduces a sociology of walls.

The Passion Narratives of Saints Perpetua, Felicity, and Their Fellow Martyrs presents a critical translation of three hagiographical masterpieces of late antiquity and a series of accompanying essays. The translation by Francis J. Hunter includes the two Acta Brevia narratives as companion texts and supplements to the Passio Sanctarum proper. The interdisciplinary essays feature input from scholars in the fields of literature, theology, psychology, and classics, who each illustrate the dynamic and rich nature of the text. Each chapter of the book is written to teach, rather than critique, the text for students or readers who wish to learn about Perpetua and Felicity, early Christianity, or the Roman empire and its relationship with the emergent Christian religion.

The Presidential Difference and Iran's Foreign Policy Under Khatami from 1997 to 2005 explores the paradigm shift, one that involved a change from confrontation to peaceful relations. The main reason for this alteration rests on Muhammad Khatami's belief system, whose discourse of "Dialogue Among Civilizations" aiming at coexistence and cooperation assured the international community that Iran would not pursue revolutionary aspirations, but rather seek constructive and meaningful relations based on equality, mutual respect and understanding. Azadeh Momeni argues that the cornerstone of this sea change in foreign policy rests on Khatam's intellectual thoughts which is characterized by his belief system. What sets this book apart is its unique approach, employing Operational Code Analysis to analyze Khatami's belief system. Operational Code Analysis is a quantitative method used in political psychology and international relations to understand the decision-making processes and beliefs of political leaders.

This book chronicles the progression of civic education advocacy since the early 2000s. It identifies the main actors that called for civic education reform, describes their motivations and policy platforms, and documents the path taken to capture state policy agendas. It argues that No Child Left Behind incentivized civic education advocates to mobilize a "call to action" to restore emphasis on civics that materialized into national policy reform proposals that successfully captured the agendas of state legislatures and bureaucracies. This book analyzes the implementation and sustainability of these civic education policy reforms by undertaking a comparative case study analysis of school districts in Utah and Connecticut. Through the voices of teachers and district administrators, the book tells the story of what happened when these state policy reforms inspired by national initiatives hit the local level where the rubber meets the road. As ideological debates about schools and democracy unfold across the country, as civic education advocates and proposals proliferate, this book treats civic education not as panacea but as a concrete policy area to be analyzed and understood. It contextualizes the current debate and offers a critical assessment of the most recent, comprehensive state-level civic education policy reform. It argues that while questions linger about what type of civic-inspired educational interventions remains most effective for whom, where, and why, the implementation of such interventions are profoundly impacted by local actors and local politics and that future initiatives should take this dimension into consideration.

Federalist Solutions to Pakistan's Political Crises investigates the transformative potential of communal democratic norms within Pakistan's politico-economic sphere. Analyzing the current consociational structure, which inordinately predicates federal organization on ethnic identity, the book reveals the particular challenges facing Pakistan, exacerbated by the imposition of neoliberal norms on its society and economy. Advocating for a localized centripetalist model, Sikander Ahmed Shah proposes leveraging power sharing to counter the prevailing hegemonic trends and to foster greater sociocultural cohesion within Pakistan's diverse polity. This model entails dividing Pakistan's federal provinces into smaller, diverse entities more reflective of their particular constituent demographics, while integrating key democratic principles such as distributive justice, grassroots democracy, minority protections, and multiculturalism into its governance structures. The book explores Pakistan's civil-military asymmetry, emphasizing the influential role of the military establishment and its intertwined relationship with preexisting inter-ethnic tensions. The analysis also extends to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), examining its impact on Pakistan's federal structure, socio-economic fabric, and civil-military dynamics within the context of China's distinctive economy. Throughout, the work seeks to provide locally relevant and indigenously viable solutions for positive and equitable outcomes, challenging historical power imbalances that have marginalized certain groups in Pakistan.

Greening Philosophy of Religion: Process, Ecology, and Ethics develops fruitful avenues for the theory and practice of greening philosophy of religion. Collected with a pluralistic conception of both philosophy and religion, the chapters in this volume address pressing and timely issues that involve imagining ecological democracy as an ideal horizon for facing climate catastrophe, with a radical hope and sober vision for realizing a more sustainable planetary economy that places a high value on food sovereignty, an ethic of trust, and inter-religious conversations. Edited by Jea Sophie Oh and John Quiring, this book offers a vital contribution to the fields of philosophy of religion, environmental ethics, religion and ecology, comparative philosophy, and ecotheology--all tuned to the note of process thinking and a deep ecological sensibility.

Criminology in Nigeria: Origin, Evolution and Trends explores the threads of the criminal justice system in Nigeria through past, present, and future trends. Tracing the roots of law and criminology in Nigeria, this book employs up-to-date research and case studies to elucidate the dynamic nature and impact of Nigeria's criminal justice system. It sheds light on the various influences of the Nigerian criminal justice system, different types of crimes, and various sentencing practices. By doing so, the book encourages readers to engage in a more critical examination of research and strategies related to security and public safety in Nigeria.This book is an essential resource that caters to students, scholars, researchers, practitioners, and curious minds seeking to gain a deeper understanding of Nigeria's criminal justice system. It evolves a thought-provoking guide and discourse, contributing to the ongoing dialogue and shaping the pursuit of justice and security in the Nigerian landscape.

The Theology of Fear in Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae excavates and explores Thomas Aquinas's comparatively expansive theology of fear that he develops in the Summa theologiae. Whereas many classify fear under a single category (e.g., an emotion, passion, or sentiment), Thomas specifies seven major categories of fear, including the passion and gift of fear. And while many classify courage as the lone virtue indexed to fear, Thomas argues that courage and perseverance perfect it, adding that a Spirit-empowered gift of courage also perfects human fears so that human beings may attain and remain in blessedness. A work in retrieval theology designed for Thomas and non-Thomas scholars operating within the interactions of theology and psychology, this book argues that understanding this theology's motivations, internal coherence, and merits is necessary for understanding Thomas's instruction for beginners in the Christian religion and its ongoing relevance for today.

African Migrants, European Borders, and the Problem with Humanitarianism presents a probing examination of the contemporary migrant "crisis" in the Mediterranean Basin. By centering our analysis on how racial slavery has shaped European democratic culture, its abolitionist traditions, and the global structures of capital accumulation, P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods reveal and confront how contemporary discourse on the migrant "crisis" displaces Black sovereign mobility. Their inquiry into the modern world's culture of politics investigates "freedom of movement" discourse's ostensible confrontation with border policing, the memorializing of Black migrant deaths by artists and advocates, and the visual imagery of a cosmopolitan and multicultural Europe as conceived by filmmakers in response to the migrant "crisis" as variants of a slaveholding culture instantiated in the early Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds. This analysis allows the authors to formulate a new critical framework for analysis of both the problems of contemporary migration and borders and the leading prescriptions on offer from analysts, advocates, and policy makers in order to develop alternate ways of conceptualizing global society.

In The Origin of the 1960s Korean Developmental Regime: Manchurian Modern, Suk-Jung Han traces the current Korean dynamism through Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state in northeast China from 1932 to 1945, which has been frozen as the sacrosanct stage of nationalist resistance. The author proposes the factor of colonial diffusion in the lineage of East Asian state-formation, which has been overlooked in the discussion of the state. He also traces the cultural flow from the Manchurian setting, which contained the seed of the future cultural prowess of Korea and maintains that modern ideas were diffused synchronically and diachronically in the Japanese empire, which was a cultural network. He further argues that Koreans' experience in the harsh periphery, Manchukuo was not just painful diaspora but the moment of adaptation, which would become the potential weapon for their Cold War competition with North Korea, also with ex-colonizers in the 21st century.

Barrio San Siro: Structural Violence in the Peripheries of Milan collects the results of five years of ethnographic research in San Siro, one of Milan's largest public housing neighborhoods. It is a study that moves from a relational conception of urban space to analyze the structural violence that affects the margins of the Lombard capital, among the folds of the rhetoric of its development, its "rebirth", and its regeneration. Alongside "second-generation" youngsters, "abandoned" elderly people, struggling committees, associations, politicians, and officials, "Barrio San Siro" develops a multi-level interpretation that moves from everyday practices to local, regional and national policies. Like other Milanese peripheral neighborhoods, San Siro emerges - page after page - as a multicultural socio-spatial configuration, at once the epitome of global conditions, the intersection of diverging interests of social and institutional actors, the result of a local history that has led to a post-Fordist and neoliberal present. A critical and reflexive narrative, a monograph that from an urban margin elaborates its idea of the anthropology of the city.

This book analyzes women's military service in the U.S. Explosive Ordnance Disposal community. During the Global War on Terrorism, the changing contexts of war brought the community to the forefront of combat preceding the 2016 policy repeal restricting women's service in combat, which positioned these women at a poignant moment in history. Through a rhetorical framework, the author analyzes the disparities between policy discourse and the lived experiences of individuals who these policies seek to regulate. Their positioning also sheds light on the challenges twenty-first century scholars face in analyzing shifting gender roles in the workplace with policies advocating for gender equality, which often buries continued gendered ideologies and discourse. This book takes a mixed methods approach of qualitative and quantitative data from surveys, available government documents, and other cultural artifacts to create a more triangulated analysis. While this book is rooted in rhetorical, and feminist rhetorical, analyses, its dynamic nature demands using an interdisciplinary approach that pulls from discourse analysis, political, historical, and military scholarship, and other humanities-based feminist scholarship.

Moving Beyond Theoria Towards Theosis focuses on the telos of man as understood in Plato's theoria, envisioned in the allegory of the cave, and early Christian reinterpretation of theoria as theosis. In his famed allegory of the cave, Plato maintains that real life exists beyond our base perceptions of reality and is found in the realm of ideas. Theoria is eternal rest in this realm and is understood as the telos of mankind. Plato's theoria underwent change as it was reinterpreted under middle-Platonic and neo-Platonic thought. These systems incorporated a more mature idea of the divine than Plato, but still minimized the material world. This book explores how early Christianity inherited Plato's cosmology and terminology. Theoria was also reinterpreted within the Christian context. Eventually the term was abandoned for theosis. Theosis is beyond theoria, as it includes contemplation of the forms as well as union with the source of the forms and the affirmation of the material realm. In this volume, Justin A. Davis shows how the Orthodox use of icons can be key to understanding theosis. The icon is a material object that connects to a higher reality, and ultimately toward union with the divine. Plato's cosmology is collapsed and transfigured in union with the uncreated energy of God. Icons are the depiction of spiritual ascesis and the new telos of man, theosis.

Contemporary Security Governance in Nigeria: Themes and Perspectives examines the theory, practice, and challenges of contemporary security governance in Nigeria and argues for the prioritization of security governance in state affairs. Al Chukwuma Okoli, Folahanmi Aina, and the contributors address the role of security in state steering, the role of the state in security, the conceptual and theoretical frames underpinning contemporary discourse on security governance, and the current position of security governance and national security architecture in Nigeria. The book begins with an examination of security governance theory, context, and dimensions; followed by presenting strategies of security governance such as intelligence oversight; and ends with analysis of state, foreign, and non-state actors' roles in security governance. It covers important issues such as state legitimacy, public emergencies, intelligence oversight, civilian-led community policing, and Operation Safe Corridor. This book provides an important contribution for scholars in governance and security, and all stakeholders in governmental and non-governmental organizations that promote national security.

Catholic Horror on Television: Haunting Faith explores the significant intersection of horror media and the Catholic Church. Religious themes enjoy a long history in film and television, with narratives featuring the supernatural, science fiction, and horror making use of Roman Catholicism in particular. The horror genre frequently tells fantastic stories about the mysteries that we seek to understand, helping to come to terms with the destructive and the monstrous. This book analyzes the genre of Catholic horror in the current television and streaming media environment, exploring its treatment of physical mortality, the metaphysics of meaning, and morality. Catholic Horror on Television: Haunting Faith offers a fresh take on how television and streaming horror series critique, expand, and interrogate Catholicism and its place in the modern world. In doing so, this book contributes to conversations in several disciplines including media, cultural, television, and religious studies.

Religious Horror and the Ecogothic explores the intersections of Anglophone Christianity and the Ecogothic, the category of Gothic literature that explores the ecocritical in Gothic literature, film, and media. Acknowledging the impact of key Christian ideologies and aesthetics upon interpretations of human relationships with the environment, works in the Ecogothic subgenre interrogate spiritual identity, unease, awe, and humanity's darker impulses in relation to myriad ecological systems. Through an extensive survey of Ecogothic texts from the eighteenth century to the present day this book illuminates the ways in which a Christianized understanding of hierarchy, dominion, fear, sublimity, and other critical areas of the human experience shapes reactions to the environment and conceptions of humanity's place in it, from Eden to Armageddon. It interrogates the evolving discourses which inform current environmental policy, as well as, more fundamentally, definitions of the 'human' in a rapidly changing world.

Guerrilla Music: Musicking as Resistance, Defiance, and Subversion provides a timely exploration of human initiations and responses to music as a process and product intrinsically part of our culture, history, place, time, and ecological musical worlds. The contributors challenge scholarly approaches wherein music is detached from the social relationships in which it is produced, transmitted, used, and judged. The notion of 'guerrilla' is a trope long applied to socio-political machinations, human conflict, and confrontation. Providing a provocative lens through which to view musicking, Guerrilla Music explores research involving human practices of music, stories, communities, and musickers worldwide that employ music to resist, defy, and subvert, whether by silence and non-compliance, reluctant subordination, subversive depowering, resistive counterpoint, or destructive, violent dismantling. The ambition of such musicking experiences resides in the richness of specific contexts spanning the subcultural local, glocal, and the universal. What better way to understand the potency of these passionate human traits than through interrogation and celebration of the life worlds of music, musicians, and those that become engulfed in musical maelstroms that incite change. Guerrilla Music both invigorates and advances scholarly debates about social power, colonisation, and difference by simultaneously exploring the social semiotics of music making and music communities, identifying powerful new ways of understanding human communication, the power of music, and what musicking means to people in the twenty-first century.

Criticism of the Court and the Evil King in the Middle Ages: Literary-Historical Analyses, identifies and discusses the discourse focused on the criticism of the court, specifically of the king, across medieval Europe. Tracing its development from the tenth through the fifteenth centuries, chapters examine Icelandic sagas, Old Spanish heroic epic poetry, courtly romances, early modern French and German prose novels, and late medieval short verse and prose narratives as well as the work of medieval critics such as John of Salisbury and Marsilius of Padua. Albrecht Classen explores how the writers used their craft creatively and covertly to voice harsh criticism of the ruling class and unearths a deep distrust of kings and other authority figures during the Middle Ages.

The U.S. political system may be getting polarized to the point where it is not only dysfunctional, but could be conducive to a single-party authoritarian transition. This book promotes a renewed appreciation for its exercise, through an examination of its history, an analysis of how and why polarization has increased in the U.S., and how compromise could better serve our approach to some current contentious issues. All of this is within the context of maintaining the priority of education for society-at-large, to improve our chances of finding common ground, pursuing non-zero sum outcomes, and reducing the political paralysis.

"Incompetence" is not an objective state lacking competence nor a kind of deficiency that needs to be filled. Rather, it is a constructed state that is productive, working in tandem with its opposite, "competence." Perception of incompetence/competence is what Michel Foucault (1977) calls a technology of "normalization" that pushes individuals to aspire to follow a shared norm, while hierarchically differentiating individuals according to their proximity to the aspired norm. The notion of incompetence is thus "productive" in that it turns individuals into specific kinds of "subjects" (Foucault 1977). The Politics of Incompetence: Learning Language, Relations of Power, and Daily Resistance further investigates other productive processes around the perception of "incompetence" specifically through its intersections with various ideologies--"academic achievement," teacher-student hierarchy, "native speaker" ideology, normative unit thinking, and privilege of vulnerability--as such intersections generate new knowledge, new reflection on one's assumptions and privilege, new space for marginalized language, and more. This volume opens up a new area of study--productive cultural politics of "incompetence"--by focusing on language learning in diverse contexts: Japanese-as-a-Second-Language classrooms in US colleges, Italian language tourism in Italy, and indigenous Māori language revitalization at an Aotearoa/New Zealand school.

This edited volume investigates the reconfiguration of gender in French banlieue cinema, interrogating whether the films produced over the last two decades provide new and viable models of resistance to dominant modes of power. Contributors take a critical approach which identifies gender as a marker of both body and identity politics to highlight the need to overcome a binary approach to banlieue aesthetics, which limits inquiry into the basis of conflict. Given that a feminization--and, to some extent, queering--of the once exclusively-masculine space is underway, contributors ultimately conclude that the banlieue and its on-screen representations cannot be properly understood unless intersectionality as a systematic approach is applied as an interpretive lens. Scholars of film, gender studies, and sociology will find this book particularly useful.

This book examines the Democratic and Republican Governors Associations from their creation in the 1960s through the 2020 elections. The author argues that the creation of these partisan organizations marked an important moment in the nationalization of American party politics. Governors created these Associations along with party elites in Washington because they recognized that decisions being made in Washington increasingly affected decision-making in the states. Governors sought to contribute to the development of national partisan electoral strategies and policy programs through these organizations to benefit their own electoral fortunes and the standing of the national parties to which they belonged. Through organization building, governors of both parties contributed to the development of more nationally focused and programmatic parties despite being state-level elected officials.

In the midst of a contentious atmosphere of the interwar period, the far-eastern province of Subcarpathian Rus' attracted the personal curiosity and professional attention of Russian ethnographer and theoretician Petr Bogatyrev and Czech journalist-writer Ivan Olbracht. Both traveled extensively in the region and immersed themselves deeply in the life and culture of the local residents, Carpatho-Rusyns, and Hasidic Jews. Witnesses to Interwar Subcarpathian Rus' The Sojourns of Petr Bogatyrev and Ivan Olbracht explores for the first time in English the legacy they bequeathed in their respective work: Bogatyrev as an apolitical ethnographic collector and theoretician and Olbracht as a passionately committed Communist whose reports and brilliant stories from the region, including Nikola Suhaj, Brigand, and The Sorrowful Eyes of Hannah Karadjic capture a glimpse of a world destined to change radically as a result of the ravages of war.

Food for the Future: Stories from the Alternative Agro-food Movement is about different foods, the stories they contain, and most of all the people in the stories. John Brueggemann interviewed dozens of farmers, chefs, non-profit managers, consumers, teachers, and healthcare providers. He argues that their individual stories point towards larger patterns that have shaped the alternative agro-food movement, and that other factors, including the environmental movement, farms, lifestyle movements, and consumers have all played a crucial role in its rise. The author concludes that the alternative agro-food movement is providing a countervailing force relative to mainstream market culture, and that instead of efficiency, profit, consumption, individualism and short-term thinking, the alternative agro-food movement emphasizes meaning, need, creation, community, and long-term thinking.

This book is a historical and discursive study of rock poetry produced in Argentina, during the "transition to democracy", in the eighties. Lucas R. Berone analyzes the lyrics and albums of a heterogeneous group of Argentine rock artists and bands, who began their career at that time, with the purpose of demonstrating the emergence and functioning of a new grammar of discursive production, which he terms the "grammar of the incognitus (or hidden) subject". This grammar is, when compared to the traditional "counterculture" rock discourse, a very specific and distinct way of elaborating the enunciative relationship between the artist and his audience. The author asserts that the new discursive grammar, focused on the singularity of the present and the "self," will produce the last important revolution in the tradition of the so-called "rock nacional"; motivating critical responses in the leaders of the movement.

Fields of Fire: Emancipation and Resistance in Colombia identifies the concept of the emancipatory network as a coordination of loose, discrete, and differentiated actors to explain how activists successfully practice high-risk activism. Illustrating that previous studies on high-risk activism come to contradictory conclusions, Fields of Fire argues that networks rather than individual characteristics are associated with mobilization. This book features unique ethnographic material of a Colombian sugarcane worker strike, interviews with workers and human rights activists in Valle del Cauca and Bogotá reveal different forms of knowledge that activists bring to a social movement. Esparza argues that the combination of these different forms of knowledge bolsters the movement's resiliency in the face of repression.

The Power and Freedom of Black Feminist and Womanist Pedagogy: Still Woke celebrates and reaffirms the power of Black feminist and womanist pedagogies and practices in university classrooms. Employing autocritography (through personal reflection, research, and critical analysis), the contributors to the volume boldly tell groundbreaking stories of their teaching experiences and their evolving relationships to Black feminist and womanist theory and criticism. From their own unique perspectives, each contributor views teaching as a life-changing collaborative and interactive endeavor with students. Moreover, each of them envisions their pedagogical practice as a strategic vehicle to transport the legacy of struggles for liberating, social justice and transformative change in the U.S. and globally. Firmly grounded in Black feminist and womanist theory and practice, this book honors the herstorical labor of Black women and women of color intellectual activists who have unapologetically held up the banner of freedom in academia.