Bücher veröffentlicht von Lexington Books

Would you want to be cared for by a robot? Michael C. Brannigan's Caregiving, Carebots, and Contagion explores caring robots' lifesaving benefits, particularly during contagion, while probing the threat they pose to interpersonal engagement and genuine human caregiving. As our COVID-19 purgatory lingers on, caring robots will join our nursing and healthcare frontlines. Carebots can perform lifesaving tasks to minimize infection, safeguard vulnerable persons, and relieve caregivers of certain burdens. They also spark profound moral and existential questions: What is caring? How will we relate with each other? What does it mean to be human?Underscoring carebots hands-on benefits, Brannigan also warns us of perils. They can be a dangerous lure in a culture that settles for substitutes and venerates the screen. Alerting us to the threatening prospect of carebots becoming our surrogate for interpersonal connection, he maintains they are not the culprits. The challenge lies in how we relate to them. While they beneficially complement our caregiving, carebots cannot replace human caring. Caring is a fundamentally human act and lies at the heart of ethics. As humans, we have a binding moral responsibility to care for the Other, and genuine caring demands our embodied, human-to-human presence.

This collection combines adaptation and disability studies to examine the ways that popular cultural remakes, reboots, and adaptations navigate representations of mental disability and health. The chapters analyze the ways that narratives of disability are framed not only by worldviews but also by the media which structure and inform them.

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 book explores the interconnectedness of the cultural zeitgeists around the anthropocene and the undead showing how the latter reveals increasing cultural anxieties over who and what constitutes humanity in the twenty-first century and whether it has a place in any possible post-Anthropocene futures.

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.

To the extent that we worry about the future, we tend to do so with the apprehension that something may go terribly wrong. Nietzsche and Tocqueville on the Democratization of Humanity is animated more by the apprehension, what if everything should go terribly right? That foreboding indelibly colored the outlook of Friedrich Nietzsche and Alexis de Tocquevilletwo thinkers seldom paired. As David A. Eisenberg argues, each in his own way envisaged the terminus toward which modernity speeds. Examining their thought allows us not only to glimpse the future that filled them with dread, but to survey a road that stretches back millennia to Athens and Jerusalem, when ideas about the primacy of reason and inborn equality of souls took root. Armed with such revolutionary teachings, a particular human type, namely the democratic, gained ascendancy. The reign of this human type portends to be so total that all other human types will be precluded in the democratic future, so that what mankinds democratization augurs is not the diversification of the species but its homogenization. The questions raised in Nietzsche and Tocqueville on the Democratization of Humanity are intended to broaden the horizons that historys democratizing forces conspire to contract.

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.

The publication of the Harry Potter series in the United States coincided with the coming-of-age of its main target audience, the millennial generation. Harry Potter and the Myth of Millennials: Identity, Reception, and Politics takes an interdisciplinary view of Harry Potter, as a series and a phenomenon, to uncover how the appeal of Harry became a lifestyle, a moral compass, and a guiding light in an era fraught with turbulence and disharmony. As a new phenomenon at the time, Harry Potter provided comfort through the heroism of the main characters, showing that perseverance and ';constant vigilance,' to quote one of the professors, could overcome the darkest of times. Hobbs argues that Harry Potter prepared an entire generation for the chaotic present marked by the 2016 Election and 2020 Pandemic by shaping the political attitudes of its readers, many of whom were developing their political identities alongside Harry. Her analysis focuses on both the novels themselves and the ways in which fans connected globally through the Internet to discuss the books, commiserate about the events swirling around them, and answer calls to action through Harry Potter-inspired activism. In short, Harry Potter and the Myth of Millennials examines how Harry Potter became a generations defining mythology of love, unity, and transformation.

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.