Bücher veröffentlicht von Lexington Books

This book examines the origins and boundaries of Japanese digital role-playing games. A geographically diverse roster of contributors introduces English-speaking audiences to Japanese video game scholarship and applies postcolonial and philosophical readings to the Japanese game text.

Music has long played a prominent role in cultural diplomacy, but until now no resource has comparatively examined policies that shape how non-western countries use music in international relations. Inspired by decolonization, this book describes policies and legal frameworks that impact music¿s role in cultural diplomacy worldwide.

Philosophy and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle: A Freedom Gaze describes the ideas that defined the movement and struggle to be free by Black people in the United States during their Modern Era. Using a historical perspective, this work engages the question of how the historical experience of oppression and the denial of humanity created space for the development of a certain consciousness. The existence and demonstration of agency within the ideas of the African diaspora and the creation of an intentional community with the aim of defining and attaining freedom are dissected in order to understand the Black community as a whole during the modern era.

Federal recognition enables tribes to govern themselves and make decisions for their citizens that have the power to retain their cultures. But over the last forty years, the news media coverage of the federal recognition of tribes has perpetuated ignorance and stereotypes about tribal sovereignty. This book examines how past coverage has prioritized gaming over sovereignty and interfered in Tribes' ability to be federally recognized. Scholars of journalism, mass communication, media studies, and indigenous studies will find this book of particular interest.

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

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.

This collection examines the political logic of the ongoing trade war between the United States and China. The contributors examine a number of theories behind the trade war, the historical background in which the trade war emerged, and the international contexts.

It is commonplace to regard many great works of literaturepoems, dramas, works of fictionas in some sense philosophical. Yet ever since Plato, there has been a tension between the kind of abstract theorizing that goes on in philosophy and the focus on concrete particulars that occurs in poetry and fiction. Beyond Words: Philosophy, Fiction, and the Unsayable elaborates on and addresses this Platonic tension, asking in what sense, if any, literature in the form of poetry, drama, short stories, and novels can contribute significantly to our philosophical understanding. Timothy Cleveland suggests there is something in certain poems, novels, and stories that makes them especially suited to expanding our awareness and understanding into the nature of things otherwise unsayable and unconceived. Such literary works show us something that a theoreticalscientific or philosophicaldiscourse cannot literally say.

This volume examines East and Southeast Asian folktales unfamiliar to most Western audiences and highlights similarities to and differences from Western folktales. The discussion includes folktales from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, China, Japan, and Korea.

Through a green criminological perspective, Angus Nurse examines the contemporary reality of corporate environmental crime and illegal activities that have become normalized within many major corporations. Arguably this is an inevitable consequence of a corporate culture that prioritizes profits and the smooth operation of market activities over environmental concerns coupled with the increased political power of major corporations that can act almost with impunity and where problems do occur, can literally buy itself out of trouble. These same corporations are broadly perceived as being responsible actors. However, Nurse argues that corporate environmental offending is often deliberate and that corporations understand that they will often be allowed to continue with polluting and non-compliant behavior because the likely enforcement responses are fines and settlements rather than criminal prosecution. Using several case studies, Nurse explores biopiracy and the rights of indigenous peoples, the behavior of oil companies in African states, the regulation of corporate social responsibility and corporate environmental responsibility, an analysis of contemporary environmental legislation and the prosecution of environmental harm, and state-corporate crime and air pollution. Dealing with these problems requires a wider notion of crime and wrongdoing that directly engages with the types of environmental offending that represent a threat to human populations and non-human nature irrespective of whether these are defined as crime by justice systems.

Mentoring While White provides a provocative and illuminating account of the mentoring experiences of Black college and university students based on their racialized and marginalized identities. The editors bring together a diverse group of scholars to present compelling argum...

Holy Hype: Religious Fervor in the Advertising of Goods and the Good News defines and explores the intersection of the sacredreligious symbols, themes, and rhetoricwithin the profane realm of advertising and promotion. Susan H. Sarapin and Pamela L. Morris trace the historical overlap of consumer and religious ideologies in society, offering detailed examples of its use throughout history through analyses of over a hundred collected advertisements, from monks selling copiers, to billboard messages from God, to angels and the worship of vodka. Throughout the book, the authors continually evaluate if and when the technique of ';holy hype' is effective through its use of recognizable sacred symbols that capture audiences' attentions and inspire both positive and negative emotions. Scholars of communication, media studies, religion, advertising, and cultural studies will find this book particularly useful.

This book brings into focus the perception of Muslim women in the United States, often overlooked in research literature and common media narratives, but at the same time facing increasing hate and aggression based on their religious and gendered identities. Guided by data from three original experiments and theories of priming and media effects, Alexis Tan and Anastasia Vishnevskaya discuss how stereotypes of Muslim women in the media influence public stereotypes, and how public stereotypes direct aggressions towards them. This book contributes to existing literature in the field by presenting evidence that both verbal and visual symbols in the media can activate implicit prejudices, and that activation can be controlled by people who self-identify as social liberals. Ultimately, Tan and Vishnevskaya suggest both media and intrapersonal interventions to mitigate harmful consequences of prejudice towards Muslim women in the United States. Scholars of media studies, communication, religious studies, gender studies, and cultural studies will find this book particularly useful.

The thirteen essays in this book offer various interpretations of Mel Gibson's work, treating this brilliant but controversial figure not only as a filmmaker but as a historian, religious thinker, and social philosopher.

"This work can be used as a basic reference book. In addition, this book is one of the most comprehensive and up-to-date studies in the field of International Relations (IR) and Security Studies"--

Gregory M. Fulkerson offers a complete portrait of what communities are, how they work, and how they are embedded in urbanrural systems at regional, national, and global scales. After explaining the concept of urbanrural systems, Fulkerson walks through the central dynamics of environmental demography, political economy, culture, social interaction, the built environment, and community connections. His focus on urbanrural systems ensures that communities are understood as nodes within a network, overcoming the tendency to view them as self-contained. Each chapter in Community in UrbanRural Systems: Theory, Planning, and Development offers a blend of classical and contemporary theories and concludes with relevant planning considerations. An additional chapter on community development provides strategies for translating planning considerations into action. The conclusion offers insights into long-term principles of community sustainability and justice.

Where is the space for contemporary environmentalism when both the utopian promises of a clean and pure earthly Eden and the dystopian prophecies of an environmental apocalypse have failed to be fully realized? Rather than falling into one of these familiar environmental categories, contemporary space is configured, as this book outlines, as heterotopia, an in-between space of dissonance, where encounters with waste are a daily occurrence and where dirty matter refuses to submit to human demands and intentions. Through an exploration of a series of spaces in which acts of leisure and recreation are configured alongside vibrant dirty matter, this book explores how contemporary heterotopia offer entanglements with a dirty other that promote novel opportunities for humans to ethically respond and be responsible to the continued presence of waste and to generate a sense of ecological care for a dirty world. In doing so, the book urges readers away from a utopian vision of what the environment should be and instead asks how we can ethically exist within and around the dirtied environment as it is. This book will be of interest to scholars of cultural studies, environmental rhetorics, and environmental ethics.

Is the USA hospitable to the slow movement? The land of fast food, get-rich-quick schemes, and 24/7 news feeds? In Slow Culture and the American Dream: A Slow and Curvy Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century, Mary Caputi argues that the slow movement has much to teach the United States at this moment in time. Although slow philosophy is in many ways opposite to the prevalent American Dream, the current cultural setting demands that we heed its teachings. The climate crisis should make us rethink our fast-paced, ever-accelerating lifestyle so that we can lighten our carbon footprint and decelerate--if not reverse-- the damage done to the planet. Equally important, however, is the movement's mandate that we slow down and savor life, focusing on quality, beauty, and calm rather than quantity and speed. Slow Food, Cittaslow (slow cities), slow fashion, slow travel, and slow parenting are examples of a philosophy that seeks to shift our focus away from "progress" as currently understood and revalue quality-of-life issues. Drawing deeply on her involvement with Slow Food and Cittaslow, the author advocates mainstreaming the philosophy of slow and thus reprioritizing the American Dream in ways that sustain the planet and teach Americans to develop a more refined aesthetic principle.

Crime in TV, the News, and Film provides a fresh look at the interplay between criminal events and the media outlets that cover them. The authors' diverse backgrounds a criminologist researcher, a documentarian and media professor, a police officer, and a criminologist who is a former TV reporter allow for frank discussion. Combining field experience with criminological research, the book gives insight to the everyday media operations that can produce most people's views on crime and profoundly influence public opinion public opinion that often frames public policy.Viewers of crime dramas and consumers of news will gain a new understanding of the way their programs are produced. Readers will become more aware of the issues and biases that sometimes cloud perceptions of crime and criminals. Finally, both experts and scholars interested in the subject will improve their discernment of media stories and media depictions, shining a light on crime in a hazy field. This book can be used in the classroom for an array of courses in the fields of media and communications, criminology, sociology, and more.

This book examines Joseph Stalin's increasing popularity in the post-Soviet space, and analyzes how his image, and the nostalgia it evokes, is manipulated and exploited for political gain. The author argues that, in addition to the evil dictator and the Georgian comrade, there is a third portrayal of Stalinthe one projected by the generation that saw the tail end of the USSR, the post-Soviet millennials. This book is not a biography of one of the most controversial historical figures of the past century. Rather, through a combination of sociopolitical commentary and autobiographical elements that are uncommon in monographs of this kind, the attempt is to explore how Joseph Stalin's complex legacies and the conflicting cult of his irreconcilable tripartite of personalities still loom over the region as a whole, including Russia and, perhaps to an even deeper extent, Koba's native landnow the independent Republic of Georgia, caught between its unreconciled Soviet past and the potential future within the European Union.

Women of the 1920s led a revolt against the old standards of womanhood that were dominating US culture. Flappers and feminists, they spoke and acted out, inspiring other women to follow. This book analyzes the work of eleven important 1920s female authors who chronicled this revolt: Anzia Yezierska, Anita Loos, Mae West, Josephine Lovett, Nella Larsen, Mourning Dove, Djuna Barnes, Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein, Bessie Smith, and Dorothy Parker. These trailblazers wrote counter-narratives to the sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia women faced during the Jazz Age. The author brings their novels, poems, plays, film scenarios, and blues lyrics into conversation with each other for the first time to show different approaches female readers could take to become autonomous individuals and full citizens. The works also encouraged readers to maintain supportive relationships with other progressive women. The author argues these works presented female readers with examples of how they could act individually and collectively to attain the political power, social status, economic independence, sexual freedom, and artistic recognition they deserved.

Francophone Sephardic Fiction:Writing Migration, Diaspora, and Modernity approaches modern Sephardic literature in a comparative way to draw out similarities and differences among selected francophone novelists from various countries, with a focus on North Africa. The definition of Sepharad here is broader than just Spain: it embraces Jews whose ancestors had lived in North Africa for centuries, even before the arrival of Islam, and who still today trace their allegiance to ways of being Jewish that go back to Babylon, as do those whose ancestors spent a few hundred years in Iberia. The author traces the strong influence of oral storytelling on modern novelists of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and explores the idea of the portable homeland, as exile and migration engulfed the long-rooted Sephardic communities. The author also examines diaspora concepts, how modernity and post-modernity threatened traditional ways of life, and how humor and an active return into history for the novel have done more than mere nostalgia could to enliven the portable homeland of modern francophone Sephardic fiction.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the disruptions of climate change are features of post-normal times. In Sociology in Post-Normal Times, Charles Thorpe contends that the modern project of creating normalcy within the nation state has broken down. Integral to this is sociology, which is the science of social reform. Drawing from the work of seminal theorists such as Zygmunt Bauman and Anthony Giddens, Thorpe contends that sociologys ';society' is no longer viable because globalization has put an end to social reform, thus the assumptions and goals of sociology must be left behind in order to create a new global humanity. In the face of the pandemic and climate change, Sociology in Post-Normal Times demands no less than the birth of a global humanity beyond nation states as the precondition for human survival.

The emergence of the social sciences, established in the mid to late nineteenth-century, had a substantial bearing on how researchers, academics, and eventually the general public thought about criminal behavior. Using Modernism as a lens, Stephen Brauer, examines how these disciplines shaped Americans' understanding of criminality in the twentieth-century and how it provides a new way to think about culture, social norms, and ultimately, laws. In theory, laws act as articulations and codifications of a community's beliefs, values, and principles. By breaking laws, criminals help us reinforce social norms by providing the opportunity to affirm what is believed to be right. By operating outside the bounds of acceptable behavior, the criminal serves as a useful figure to understand what is at stake in the culture, what the central issues of that culture might be, and what the fears and anxieties are. Criminality serves as a lens through which we can read ourselves and how the criminal operates as a cultural figure signifies the things we are negotiating in our lives and in our communities. Brauer focuses on two main concepts, central to the very concept of Modernism, to explore criminality: contingency, the idea that the individual might not be in control of their own deviance, and agency, the notion that the criminal makes a conscious choice to use crime as a means of economic success. The figure of the criminal is a powerful one and is key to exploring American twentieth-century culture. This book would be of interest to students and scholars in criminology, sociology, cultural studies, literary studies, history, and many others.

This book interrogates how identities are politicized, transformed, and mobilized throughout the African continent to demonstrate alternatives for nation building. It examines ways of transforming identity and provides concrete options where institutions and technology mobilize for education and empowerment around issues of African identities.