Bücher veröffentlicht von Lexington Books

The Conservative Aesthetic explores a circle of western writers and artists that rose up around Theodore Roosevelt in the late nineteenth century. It makes the case that their unique alloy of popular Darwinism and western mythmaking represent an aesthetic component of American conservatism that has long been overlooked.

Everyday Belonging in the Post-Soviet Borderlands examines the Russophone communities in peripheral cities adjacent to the Russian borders in Estonia and Kazakhstan. The research adopts a cross-disciplinary, space-sensitive approach that focuses comparatively on individual memories, narratives, and performances. Based on ethnographic examples, this book reconstructs belonging as a complex dialectical relationship between ';inclusion' and ';exclusion.' This relationship, it is argued, manifests itself through a continuous spiral of boundary construction, appropriation, and transgression among different versions of Estonianness and Kazakhness, Europeanness and Cosmopolitanness, as well as Russianness.

Christian Women and Modern China explores how women have made history throughout the development of Chinese Protestantism. Studying their lived experiences facilitates a nuanced understanding about the interplays of Christianity, gender, power and modern Chinese history.

Faiths in Green addresses the complex and fraught relationship between religious identity and environmental concern in the United States, particularly how that relationship has changed over time. Examining the effects of religious upbringing, belonging, and disaffiliation on environmental concern across multiple religious groups over several decades, the author shows where, when, how, and why religious groups and their memberships have responded constructively to environmental change over time. The author also visits the effects of gender, social class, race, and politics on both religion and environmental concern in the U.S. Faiths in Green offers an in-depth and accessible guide to understanding the at-times incongruous relationship between religious beliefs and motivations, as well as ways to follow cultural shifts that both drive and are driven by religious persons and institutions. In examining how religious and cultural factors are linked to environmental concern over time, Faiths in Green demonstrates the importance of morality and worldviews in confronting global hazards of unprecedented scale.

Media Feedback: Our Lives in Loops provides an overview of the concept of media feedback, which is inherent in nearly every media platform we encounter on a daily basis. Rogers argues that every like on Facebook, view on Instagram, death in a video game, and movie suggestion on Netflix is a form of feedback that guides our actions and improves our performance. Rogers continues on to claim that in the current media landscape, more often than not, we are influenced by some kind of media feedback, even when we aren't aware of it. This book employs a series of studies on media feedback to provide a resource for readers to understand not only what media feedback is, but also how it impacts our everyday lives. Scholars of media studies, communication, psychology, and sociology will find this book particularly useful.

Young people who have received special education services in the United States are vastly overrepresented in juvenile and adult criminal justice systems relative to their numbers in the general population. Although much existing research blames individual kids for getting arrested, school-level policies and practices affect a variety of student outcomes, including involvement with the justice system. These school-level policies and practices canand shouldbe altered by teachers, administrators, and policy makers to reduce the number of young people getting arrested. Disabling the School-to-Prison Pipeline uses administrative data from New York City public schools and interviews with young people who have received special education services in NYC public schools and been arrested to better understand how schools can help or harm students receiving special education services. Schools cannot fix all problems associated with the criminal justice system in the United States; however, we can certainly expect schools not to make existing problems worse. This book identifies school-level policies and practices that may lead to negative outcomes for students, such as getting arrested, and suggests alternatives.

Literary Slumming: Slang and Class in Nineteenth-Century France applies a sociolinguistic approach to the representation of slang in French literature and dictionaries to reveal the ways in which upper-class writers, lexicographers, literary critics, and bourgeois readers participated in a sociolinguistic concept the author refers to as ';literary slumming', or the appropriation of lower-class and criminal language and culture. Through an analysis of spoken and embodied manifestations of the anti-language of slang in the works of Eugene Franois Vidocq, Honore de Balzac, Eugene Sue, Victor Hugo, the Goncourt Brothers, and mile Zola, Literary Slumming argues that the nineteenth-century French literary discourse on slang led to the emergence of this sociolinguistic phenomenon that prioritized lower-class and criminal life and culture in a way that ultimately expanded class boundaries and increased visibility and agency for minorities within the public sphere.

Exploring Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality in Four Spanish Plays explores society's influence on identity in Spanish theatrical works and discusses parallels to these works in contemporary popular culture. The Spanish plays El retablo de las maravillas (The Marvelous Puppet Show) by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1615); Virtudes vencen seales (Virtues Overcome Signs) by Velez de Guevara (1620); El pblico (The Audience) by Federico Garca Lorca (1929;, and La llamada de Lauren (Lauren's Call) by Paloma Pedrero (1985) all deal with characters in the midst of a crisis of identity. Using an eclectic approach, supported by contemporary theories of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, Beth Bernstein analyzes the four plays in terms of identity and shows how society imposes the construction of identity. As the characters reach to define themselves, internal and external pressures guide them in interpreting acceptable behavior. This book offers a close reading of the psychological struggle of the characters, driven by society to cover their differences with a symbolic mask which, if donned, will eventually devour their true identity.

Gramsci and Media Literacy: Critically Thinking about TV and the Movies offers a series of contemporary media analyses that use Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony to explore how dominant ideologies in media delivery, historical storytelling, and gender in today's mass media environment become the commonsense viewpoints that maintain power structures in civil society. Through a media literacy approach, case studies of ideological delivery through television and film illustrate why Gramscian media theory serves as a valuable tool for revealing the many ways hegemonic thought operates in the media sphere and in everyday life, and they offer hope for counterhegemonic understandings.

The contemporary idea of the ';work of art' is paradoxically both widely used and often unexamined. Therefore, we must re-evaluate the concept before we can understand what the deconstruction of aesthetics means for thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. By examining their analyses of works of visual art and contextualizing their thinking on the matter, Martta Heikkil asserts that the implications of the ';work of art,' ';art,' and ';the aesthetic' apply not only to philosophical questions but also to a broader area. Instead of the totality represented by the historical concept of Art, poststructuralist thinkers introduce the idea of the radical multiplicity of art and its works. From this notion arises the fundamental issue in Derrida and the poststructuralist tradition: how can we speak philosophically of art, which always exists as singular instances, as works? In Deconstruction and the Work of Art: Visual Arts and Their Critique in Contemporary French Thought, Heikkil shows that the deconstructionist notions of art are still influential in the discourses of contemporary art, in which artworks proliferate and the concept of ';work' is open-ended and expanding. This book offers an introduction to the deconstructionist theory of art and brings new perspectives to the complex, undecidable relation between philosophy and art.

This book argues that Africa should shift its development paradigm to pursue a model of regional corporation that brings integration and development objectives together. This would move Africa up global production value chains with the beneficiation and transformation of its minerals and the diversification of its economies.

Veronika Groke interrogates the concept of the comunidad indigena (indigenous community) and the role it plays within contemporary Bolivian discourse by examining its relation to the history and social life of a Guarani community in Bolivia.

The New Cinematic Weird argues that weird fiction is rising also in audiovisual culture. Presenting several detailed analyses of weird cinematic works, the book shows how the new cinematic weird is best understood as atmospheric worldings affective intensities that suffuse the experience of the cinematic weird. The weird exists as an experiential field, an inflation of the world. These worldings disclose a variety of experiences. The book engagingly shows how creepy, unsettling, ominous, uneasy, and eerie atmospheres provide a way into the weird experience. This book is important to anyone interested in the audiovisual weird, cinematic atmospheres, how audiovisual media produce worlds, and how weird fiction challenges our conception of the way the world is.

The American Dream for Students of Color examines how the American Dream informs beliefs about talent, hard work, and perseverance rather than dismantling barriers to educational success for marginal students. Using narrative methodologies, connections between the authors narratives and those of school youth and educators are explored.

The popular protests in early 2011 were once seen as a turning point in the history of the Arab world, raising hopes for democracy, freedom, and justice in the Middle East. A decade after the uprisings, these hopes are largely dashed in each country swept by popular protests with the exception of Tunisia. Tunisia became the only democracy in the entire region while Egypt saw its first freely elected president and government thrown out by the army in a bloody coup which resulted in a regime that is no less authoritarian than Mubarak's. This book provides a detailed analysis of the political, economic, and constitutional developments in Tunisia and Egypt. In the light of the existing literature on comparative democratization, the author explores why Egypt's path to democratization was eroded by several transitional actors while Tunisian political elite managed to move the country towards democracy. The book centers its focus on the role of the political agents in designing the transition and explores the transitional period with respect to the interactions among the political elite and their cost-benefit assumptions, ideological interests, as well as their commitment to democratic processes.

This book interrogates the relations between nostalgias of today and past utopias in the context of the space age of the 20th century and its cinematic representations in the USSR and in post-Soviet Russia. Once an enthusiastic projection, then a promising and uncanny present, and eventually an assemblage of nostalgic signifiers, in the history of world cinema, this space age has been linked primarily to the genre of science fiction. Here, aspects of the space age such as humanity's imminent expansion to space, interplanetary travel, contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, and intergalactic governance and economy were both celebrated and critically interrogated as cosmopolitan ideals and nation-branding strategies. This book presents the contemporary relevance of this genre as heritage and legacy, archive and canon, and a nest of forgotten ideals and warnings, as well as nostalgic anchoring points. The author analyzes over 30 Soviet science fiction films, foregrounding their structures of utopia and their evolution over time, in order to trace both their transnational positionalities, transmedial resonance, and impact on post-Soviet Russian films about the space age. Concepts, crucial to the understanding of space futures of the past, such as utopianism, otherness, liminality, and no(w)stalgia are activated to draw out the fictional tenants of the memory of the Soviet space age, and to establish the limits and potentialities of Soviet (exra)terraformative ambitions.

This book examines the drama of the eleventh century papal reform movement and the contest between papacy and empire through the life and career of Bishop Bonizo of Sutri (ca. 1045-ca. 1094). This author reveals that the populist roots of this ardent reformer's religious vision, including his vision of holy war.

The time period of 1990-2010 marks a significant moment in Spanish literary publishing that emphasized a new focus on Africa and African voices and signaled the beginning of a publishing boom of Hispano-African authors and themes. Africa in the Contemporary Spanish Novel, 1990-2010 analyzes the strategies that Spanish and Hispano-African authors employ when writing about Africa in the contemporary Spanish novel. Focusing on the former Spanish colonial territories of Morocco, Western Sahara, and Equatorial Guinea, Mahan L. Ellison analyzes the post-colonial literary discourse about these regions at the turn of the twenty-first century. He examines the new ways of conceptualizing Africa that depart from an Orientalist framework as advanced by novelists such as Lorenzo Silva, Concha Lopez Sarasa, Ramon Mayrata, and others. Throughout, Ellison also places the novels within their historical context, specifically engaging with the theoretical ideas of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), to determine to what extent his analysis of Orientalist discourse still holds value for a study of the Spanish novel of thirty years later.

This book provides an overview of key concepts and issues in global politics.

Drawing from the works of George Herbert Mead, Kenneth Burke, and Mikhail Bakhtin, this work argues that everyday interactions are inescapably dramas, conducted through the use of dialogues in order to promote mutual understanding.

This is a comprehensive analysis on Nigeria, its people, and emerging contemporary digital trends through the expanding concept of the virtual community. It uses Farooq Kperogi, a prominent leader in the virtual community, and his writings as a lens to foreground the discussion.

This study examines the debates, history, and theory surrounding Stalinism and the Soviet Union. The author argues that the growing popularity of socialism in the United States calls for a renewed look at the legacy of Stalinism.

This interdisciplinary edited collection examines multiple themes found within the popular Netflix series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Chapters on topics such as genre, postmodernism, adaptation, history, fashion, and ideology offer new insights and contextualize the series within contemporary teen television.