Black Panther: Wakandan “Civitas” and Panthering Futurity

Edited by Jorge Serrano, University of Delaware

This interdisciplinary academic study is for readers interested in film, media, and the comic book genre. Superhero theories are abundant, especially considering their use as a tool for coping with adversity, and some note that it is an integral part of American society, young formative minds, in particular. It is not just about learning morals but also seeing how an ideal society should function and look. There are works that review superheroes and theories about comic book series adaptions in film and text, but the writers in this compendium engage not only with the film and the intersectionality of women, Asian culture, Du Bois, and even Greek Ajax and others for comparison but also comparative analysis of works that capture African and African diasporic representation throughout various historical time periods. The anthology presents discourse that engages a variety of assessments that involve questions of positive and pejorative representation. Educators will find this a useful tool for undergraduate students as well as general audiences interested in this popular film/comic series.

Common and Uncommon Quotes: A Theory and History of Epigraphs

Jared A. Griffin, University of Alaska Anchorage

'Common and Uncommon Quotes: A Theory and History of Epigraphs' is a prolegomenon to the study of epigraphic paratextuality. Building on the work of Gerard Genette’s paratextual studies, this volume contextualizes and traces the practice of epigraphy in Anglophone literary history, from the fifteenth to the early twentieth century. This study explores how epigraphs are used by author-functions as a hermeneutic for their text and to establish ethos with their audience, and how that paratextual relationship changed as publishing opportunities and literacy rates grew over four centuries. The first broad-reaching study of this kind, 'Common and Uncommon Quotes' seeks to understand how epigraphs work: through their privilege on the page, their appeal to conjured ideas of the past, and their calls to citizenship.

Gamification in the RhetComp Curriculum

Edited by Chris McGunnigle, Seton Hall University

Gamification is an up and coming popular trend in all levels and types of education, including public and private schools, higher education, the military, the private sector, and elsewhere. Gamification introduces aspects of game design like teamwork, competition, rewards and prizes, storytelling, and more into lesson plan units. In many cases, actual games, whether it be Scrabble, Hangman, Candy Crush, Dungeons & Dragons, and many others, are adapted into educational tools. This chapter collection will specifically look at the use of gamification techniques in Freshmen Writing courses and related Composition, Writing and Rhetoric classes. Each chapter will provide sample gamified lessons supported by relevant scholarship in both Gamification Theory and Writing Studies.

Developing Effective International Education Experiences: Preparing Pre-Service Teachers for the Classroom

Edited by Sara Tours, University of Pennsylvania and Jeremy M. Lynch, Slippery Rock University

Globally, and within the United States, we continue to progress toward a more diverse and inclusive culture. This fact is perhaps reflected nowhere better than in the public school system in the United States, where, by 2029 (NCES, 2020), non-white students will outnumber white students in classrooms. The challenges that the current system of education confronts in ensuring equitable access and equal achievement are also well-documented (Darling-Hammond, 2015). A key component in the re-shaping and development of a more equitable and inclusive system are the pre-service teachers enrolled in our college and university teacher preparation programs across the country. As we prepare for the diverse classrooms of the future, we need to prepare the teachers of the future to not only be able to teach all students but to also have the cultural competencies to ensure the same access and opportunities are provided to all students. It has been well documented (Cunningham, 2015; Lupi & Turner, 2013) that international education experiences, or international field experiences, have a positive effect on both the professional development and cultural competencies of pre-service teachers. Across a wide range of performance outcomes, pre-service teachers with international field experiences are better equipped to enter the field (DeVillar & Jiang, 2012) and may even persist longer in the profession (Egeland, 2016). However, not all international experiences provide the same positive outcomes. In this book, we will explore the importance of developing culturally competent educators in the United States education system, the research that supports the benefits of international education experiences, and how to develop effective international education experiences that will prepare pre-service teachers for the classrooms of the next decade and beyond.

The end of the Western Civilization? The Intellectual Journey of Humanity to Adulthood

Hippokratis Kiaris, University of South Carolina

Civilizations can be perceived as living human beings that are born, mature, age, and ultimately die and disappear, passing their legacy to the future generations. These transitions may be projected to the different stages of cognitive development of children. The Western Civilization, which embodies our current state of cultural advancement from the Classic Greek to the modern period, can be paralleled by the gradual transitions of human beings toward adulthood. From this perspective, the ancient Greek era resembles the toddler years of humanity at which the first “why”-type questions are being asked. The theocratic period that followed until the Renaissance can be seen as our childhood, when people lived their lives under the tight boundaries set by religious authorities. The period spanning from the Enlightenment until almost the end of the 20th century can be considered as our teenage years when people rediscover their past, are liberated from superstition, and set the path forward based on reason by a manner at which the distinction between plausible and feasible is vague. Within this scheme, postmodernism also finds its place in our teenhood. The last few decades, from this perspective, signify our entrance to adulthood at which major questions are considered answered, or at least settled, and the only path forward perceived as feasible is the one that is followed already, a state that is bringing us closer to our intellectual aging and its inevitable death. Some signs of aging-related pathologies are already manifested in today’s technology-intensive society. By identifying our intellectual age and by appreciating our health status, we may be able to proactively delay or even avert our intellectual aging and death.

The Anthropic Principle: A Universe Built for Man

Anthony Walsh, Boise State University

The Copernican Principle states that humankind is an insignificant assemblage of chemical scum living on an accidental planet in a suburb of a purposeless universe. Many prominent scientists, including Nobel laureate physicists, have questioned this scurrilous principle, which has led physicists to propose the Anthropic Principle. This principle posits a purposeful link between the structure of the universe and the existence of humankind and its specialness. The numerous features of the universe are so freakishly fine-tuned for the existence of intelligent life that physicists are beginning to come to grips with the notion that our universe is profoundly purposeful and that there is a powerful and incredibly intelligent Mind behind it all.

Madwomen in Social Justice Movements, Literatures, and Art

Edited by Jessica Lowell Mason, University at Buffalo and Nicole Crevar, University of Arizona

'Madwomen in Social Justice Movements, Literatures, and Art' boldly reasserts the importance of the Madwoman more than four decades after the publication of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s seminal work in feminist literary criticism, 'The Madwoman in the Attic'. Since Gilbert and Gubar’s work was published, the Madwoman has reemerged to do important work, rock the academic boat, and ignite social justice agency inside and outside of academic spaces, moving beyond the literary context that defined the Madwoman in the late 20th century. In this dynamic collection of essays, scholars, creative writers, and Mad activists come together to (re)define the Madwoman in pluralistic and expansive ways and to realize new potential in Mad agency. This collection blazes new directions of thinking through Madness as a gendered category, comprised of a combination of creative works that (re)imagine the figure of the Madwoman, speeches in which Mad-identifying artists and writers reclaim the label of “Madwoman,” and scholarly essays that articulate ambitious theories of the Madwoman. The collection is an interdisciplinary scholarly resource that will appeal to multiple academic fields, including literary studies, disability studies, feminist studies, and Mad studies. Additionally, the work contributes to the countermovement against colonial, sanist, patriarchal, and institutional social practices that continue to silence women and confine them to the metaphorical attic. Appealing to a broad audience of readers, 'Madwomen in Social Justice Movements, Literatures, and Art' is a cutting-edge inquiry into the implications of Madness as a theoretical tool in which dissenting, deviant, and abnormal women and gender non-conforming writers, artists, and activists open the door to Mad futurities.

Media, Practice and Theory: Tracking emergent thresholds of experience

Edited by Nicole De Brabandere, McGill University

This volume gathers research at the intersection of art and the interdisciplinary humanities to develop an understanding of media assemblages that insist on the generativity of their situatedness within ecologies of practice. These contributions propose media assemblages that enlarge the time and space for co-compositions between media and bodies that reshape subjective, perceptual, and affective registers of experience. Media assemblages include photography, performance, criticism, curation, installation, animation, collage, video and VR, as well as archival and somatic practices. Research as a form of practice is a key orientation in this volume since it offers a means of engaging the world-making proposition offered by Isabelle Stengers that practices are specified through irreducible entanglements that cause one to think, feel, and hesitate. The generative linkages between different disciplinary approaches for engaging research practice across the arts and humanities are favoured over disciplinary and media-based exclusivity. When practice is not posed as an intervention or counterpoint to scholarly research or in opposition to the discursive, differences emerge, not based on convention but through the situatedness of emergent insight. The goal is thus not to forward a reproducible formula for knowledge creation but to weave the conditions for utterances both within and in excess of discipline, convention, and establishment. How can research engender the making of communities between, across, and in excess of institutional frameworks through the emergent affinities, postures, and formats of evolving and inclusive forms of research? This volume is a valuable reference for researchers/practitioners within the arts and humanities as it exemplifies both critical and situated methods for developing interdisciplinary research as a means of transforming the terms of research itself.

Getting Bergson Straight: The Contributions of Intuition to the Sciences

Pete A. Y. Gunter, University of North Texas

This study concerns the ideas of one particular philosopher, Henri Bergson, whose views of time, intuition, and creativity have had a significant impact on art, literature, and the humanities, both in his time and in our own. Although it is generally recognized that Bergson’s ideas have significantly impacted the arts and the humanities, it has not been recognized how they have also had a creative influence on the sciences as well. Nor has it been realized that this was one of his most basic contentions. Bergson’s conception of intuition—his fundamental insight into reality—was not limited to fugitive insights into human existence. By realizing previously unsuspected possibilities for research and discovery, his endeavors were also meant to make possible new advances in the sciences. If it enabled his cousin by marriage, Marcel Proust, to explore human memory in depth, it also inspired psychologists like Daniel Schachter to use Bergson’s ideas to make real contributions to contemporary memory science. If his notion of creative evolution brought many thinkers to a belief in human creative freedom, it brought others (notably Alexis Carrel and Pierre Lecomte de Noüy) to a scientific study of biological time. Among his successful speculations was the theory of the Big Bang cosmology. 'Getting Bergson Straight' shows many points at which Bergson’s ideas anticipated future developments in the sciences. This was seen clearly by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis de Broglie who viewed Bergson’s physics as presaging quantum physics. Thus, the text is well situated for arts, humanities, social science, and natural science classrooms studying creative thinking and/or intellectual history.

Theatre as Alter/"Native" in Derek Walcott

Nirjhar Sarkar, Raiganj University, India

'Theatre as Alter/“Native” in Derek Walcott' attempts a close and detailed politico-aesthetic analysis of his major plays. At the core of this book lies the attempt to answer the question of how postcolonial artists and intellectuals have dared to imagine radically different ways of living in the face of oppositional, binary choices. And as the title suggests, Walcott’s plays carve out critical spaces for new narratives of “becoming” and alternative priorities, entangled in contesting identities inscribed by race, language and ethnicity. Theatre, as Walcott knew, would be instrumental in demystifying Caribbean “Absence” and “Void” and generating an alternative version of dominant reality. By a deliberate unseating of the Western texts, filled with banal stereotypes and their representational biases, and by triggering “re-action” to the scripts of the colonizers in profoundly paradoxical ways, Walcott’s plays affirm the Caribbean identity. This study seeks to demonstrate how his plays open an alter/“native” universe in terms of aesthetics, dramaturgy and the performative, and reclaims ‘New World’ identity in terms of negotiation rather than negation—undermining the claim of “solid”, “authentic” culture. Placing the arts at the forefront of nation-building, Walcott situated his plays at a crucial juncture between the passing of the Empire and the newly-born Federation in his archipelago.

Women and Religion in Britain Today

Belonging

Edited by Yvonne Bennett, Canterbury Christ Church University

Little is written about the lived religious lives of women in 21st-century Britain. The authors of this book seek to address this gap by exploring contemporary women’s spirituality in Britain. As the authors inhabit different academic fields, we bring together an interdisciplinary collection of voices to address this subject. We examine a range of ways in which religion continues to impact the lives of women in Britain today. The chapters of this book examine the manner in which religion and spirituality continue to impact women’s lives, and by doing so, we offer a heterogeneous look at religion in the 21st century. We not only tackle the spirituality of our research participants but, by writing about our experiences as ‘women being spiritual’, we offer a hybrid academic-practitioner viewpoint. From Islamic marriage laws to the ordination of female Anglican clergy, we focus on the concept of belonging (or not) through culture and the use of female-only spaces and organisations. Belonging is an important social motive; the need for acceptance and belonging is a fundamental concept that drives behaviours. Exploring how we belong grants an understanding of how choices are made, both by the individual and the group.

New to the LSP classroom? A selection of monographs on successful practices

Edited by Martina Vranova, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic

As Languages for Specific Purposes have always been defined as student-oriented, the rationale behind this volume is to use the rather neglected niche of the other necessary agent of language instruction and thus focus on the LSP practitioner. This turn towards the instructor has been motivated by the fact that a great number of LSP practitioners enter their jobs without previous expertise. They lack LSP education, or they may not even have a background in applied linguistics. This motivation has proven valid as many of the volume’s contributors have faced this particular situation in their professional lives. For insights into the LSP field and guidelines on the best practices, they must rely on their colleagues who offer to share their experience through workshops, conferences, or papers, which is what this volume provides. The primary goal of this volume is to present considerations of what challenges LSP practitioners face and should be prepared for in their jobs and to provide practice-tested methodological guidelines on such demanding teaching techniques as blended and flipped learning or tandem learning. All papers have been written by LSP practitioners and researchers in higher education. Thus, this volume provides both guidance and self-reflection. In other words, it is written by experienced LSP practitioners for aspiring LSP practitioners about how they see themselves and what effort they make to meet the challenges of their jobs. As proof that LSP practice is a global challenge, papers have been collected from many European countries, the USA, Uruguay. Even though most papers are naturally concerned with English, being the lingua franca of today, the collection also features guidelines for teaching Spanish, French and Dutch for specific purposes. Moreover, the target disciplines these languages are taught for encompass business, engineering, sociology or medicine, thus supporting the assumption of the universal character of problems LSP practitioners deal with.

Being in Conscience: A Theory of Ethics

Lambros Philippou

This book aims to suggest a worldview departing from an articulation of a theory of conscience. It analyses the constitutive parts of conscience, a concept that has not been thoroughly examined and analysed in the discussions on ethics. Having the mechanisms of production of conscience as a point of reference, the book proceeds to discuss the concepts of subjective and collective evil. The concept of being in enhanced conscience aims to position the subjective conscience in human historicity. Based on the analysis of the roots of conscience, the subject is placed in the public sphere from the point of view of its corporeal harmony and disharmony as the conditions for its binding with the institutions and the spirit of a worldsphere. The book then expands its scope by addressing the question of what makes a worldsphere functional and dysfunctional. This analysis is useful for scholars who are interested in the deep structural conditions that produce and sustain a liberal democratic state. Through the analysis of inner-worldly and inter-worldly temporality, the mode of the creative rhythm is depicted by underlining the creative divergence that occurs not only within distinct worlds but also between worldspheres. The mediation of this analysis introduces the concept of planetary functionality whereby what is at stake is the islands of functionality that serve the survival of an interconnected world. The theory of conscience is applied also to the analysis of the state and of the economy. Conscience is also identified with the properties attributed to God, suggesting a new understanding of the meaning of religion and its role in human historicity. Finally, it argues that we should understand the future as the future of conscience that can function as the only motor of historical evolution.

Transnational Spaces: Celebrating Fifty Years of Literary and Cultural Intersections at NeMLA

Edited by Carine Mardorossian, University of Buffalo and Simona Wright, The College of New Jersey

This volume celebrates fifty years of NeMLA’s important presence in the world of academia with a collection of essays that adopt a transnational critical lens. With the present selection, we intend to add our voices to the ongoing debate centered on the renegotiation of space, national, and cultural geographies; to foster both the re-thinking of language(s) and literature(s) not exclusively in English and the study of race, gender, sexuality, and class within and across national boundaries. Most pertinently for this collection, we hope to add meaningful material to produce new theoretical paradigms and to rethink the role and significance of the humanities in today’s world. In this light, 'Transnational Spaces: Celebrating Fifty Years of Literary, Cultural, and Language Intersections at NeMLA' offers a contribution to the study of our present, transnational condition, from the point of view of an organization, the 'Northeast Modern Language Association', that since its inception in 1969, has sought to provide a space of encounter, debate, and open intellectual exchange for all its members as well as for the academe at large. The essays contained in this volume emphasize the interdependency and interrelations engendered by the globalized world in which we live, highlighting the possibility to create new knowledge and forms of understanding across the boundaries of nationhood and region. At the same time, they remind us that the present situation calls for a radical self-examination of a history of systemic racism which continues to produce episodes of police brutality, rationalizes cultural and economic exclusion, and normalizes the incarceration of African Americans and “illegal” immigrants, including children and minorities. In this light, with this volume, we hope to have provided inclusive, egalitarian, and cosmopolitan spaces of encounter, exchange, and interrogation.

Socializing Militants: How States End Asymmetric Conflict with Non-State Militants

Jeremiah Rozman, Association of the United States Army

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen states engaged in long-term conflicts with asymmetrically weaker non-state actors (NSA). States aim to end these conflicts as quickly as possible by combining force and diplomacy to socialize these militants—meaning give them the characteristics of states—in order to make a credible bargain achievable. The militant’s characteristics determine the state’s optimal strategy. In times of conflict, politicians and pundits often march out an oft-cited phrase in support of negotiations: “if you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.” This is only possible when the opponent is willing to make peace under acceptable terms and able to enforce abidance. Some opponents have an ideologically driven fundamental purpose that precludes renouncing violence under terms that a state could accept. Others have reasonable demands and are structured in a way that allows productive negotiations. In other cases, the non-state militant is not yet the type that can be bargained with but can be socialized into this type through a state’s correct application of force and diplomacy. I call this “socialization logic.” I argue that optimally, states tailor their strategy to socialize with their opponent, to make it possible to successfully negotiate peace. In practice, the state’s strategy is often distorted by its internal and external constraints. Socialization logic provides a novel typology of non-state militants based on how well interstate conflict bargaining concepts can be applied to them. It looks beyond tactics, to systematize a framework for understanding how leaders tailor strategy towards non-state opponents based on their characteristics. Socialization logic examines the NSA type as endogenous to the strategy that the state employs and provides a framework for leaders to design a strategy to end the conflict. Finally, socialization logic synthesizes critical NSA attributes (ideology, leadership structure, and governance function) and the state’s strategy (distorted by constraints) into in an interactive model. Through 41 interviews, primary and secondary source data, I analyze the United States’, Russia’s and Israel’s asymmetric conflicts with militants and demonstrate that socialization logic most comprehensively explains their strategies throughout those conflicts.

Rethinking Islamism beyond jihadi violence

Fighting ideas leaving the sword aside

Edited by Elisa Orofino, Anglia Ruskin University (ARU)

For several years now, Islamism has been associated with 'jihadism' and violent extremism both in academia and in contemporary political debates. However, this association can be misleading: Islamism has much deeper roots than 'jihadi terrorism' and it stands as a powerful and complex ideology inspiring thoughts, actions and groups all over the world. Emerging as a protest-for-justice ideology claiming freedom against Western colonisation of the Muslim world, Islamism has triggered both individuals and groups worldwide since the early 1900s. Almost as a sacred ideology – based on the need to revive Islam as the only saving grace for Muslims around the world – Islamism started to be widely associated with 'jihadism' after 9/11. Before then, Islamism was not automatically related to terrorism but to resistance. Given that terrorists are only a small and definite portion of Islamists, this volume aims to re-focus research on Islamism beyond 'jihadism' by collecting relevant contributions on Islamist but non-violent organisations. More precisely, this volume innovatively contributes to current academic debates by exploring the origins of Islamism and the differences between 'jihadism', the evolution of Islamism over time and places and the role played by the most influential non-'jihadist' Islamist organisations active today as powerful non-state actors.

The Essentials of Husserl: Studies in Transcendental Phenomenology

V. C. Thomas, Centre for Phenomenological Sciences, India; Pondicherry University, India

Known as the founder of the phenomenological movement, this book examines Husserl’s various phases of phenomenology during his realist, transcendental, static, genetic, and post-Crisis (of European Sciences) periods. Consisting of ten carefully researched and thoroughly examined essays, this book describes Husserl’s concepts and ideas through numerous examples and diagrammatic representations, in a bid to elucidate the nuances of phenomenology for its readers. Valuable insights into Husserl’s realist phase are made in the chapter on Meaning, and the chapters on Natural Attitude, Epoché and Phenomenological Reduction, while the chapter on Noesis & Noema symbolizes the transcendental phase. Thomas points out Husserl’s transition from static to genetic phenomenology in the chapter on Lived Body, with the chapters on Lifeworld, and the Notion of the Other, later focusing on this perspective. Husserl’s entire phenomenological space, including his pre-phenomenological period, are covered in the chapter on Lived Time. However, the chapters on Phenomenology: The Study of Self and Beyond, and Consciousness and Intentionality are the fulcrums upon which the edifice of phenomenology turns. The final chapter on Presuppositionlessness in phenomenology expresses Thomas’ personal enquiries into Husserl’s contention that phenomenology is a presuppositionless science. This book will be of particular interest to research scholars and post-graduate students in the areas of Philosophy and Social Sciences, as well as those interested in contemporary Western Philosophy, and the history and development of Ideas.

The Man who Killed Apartheid: The Life of Dimitri Tsafendas

New Updated Edition

Harris Dousemetzis, University of Durham and Gerry Loughran

On 6 September 1966, inside the House of Assembly in Cape Town, Dimitri Tsafendas fatally stabbed Hendrik Verwoerd, South Africa’s Prime Minister and so-called “architect of apartheid.” Tsafendas was immediately arrested, and before the authorities had even questioned him, they declared him a madman without any political motive for the killing. In the Cape Supreme Court, Tsafendas was found unfit to stand trial on the grounds that he suffered from schizophrenia and that he had no political motive for killing Verwoerd. Tsafendas spent the next 28 years in prison, making him the longest-serving prisoner in South African history. For most of his incarceration, he was subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment by the prison authorities. This new updated edition contains all the developments regarding the Tsafendas case after the publication of the book's first edition.

The Good, Green Gold of Spring: A Conservation Sociology of the Island Marble Butterfly

Jon Dahlem, Bellevue University

This book presents a case study of Island Marble Butterfly (IMB) conservation from an environmental sociological perspective. Using qualitative methods, the study explicates various social components of a collaboration of stakeholders working together to protect the species from extinction. Rediscovered in 1998 after being presumed extinct for nearly a century, the IMB persists exclusively among the San Juan Islands, WA, where the efforts of scientists, local conservationists, government employees, and non-profit organizations have sustained the species, even achieving a listing under the Endangered Species Act. For these reasons and many others, the IMB presents a case in some ways fascinating for its idiosyncrasies and in other ways indicative of broader trends in conservation work in an era of rapid global biodiversity loss. From the study emerges a call for increased sociological research that contributes knowledge beneficial to conservation practice, or what the book calls “conservation sociology.” The book reviews existing literature in this space and provides a framework for constructing research, theory, and application in conservation sociology. As the social components of IMB conservation are explored, so too are components of conservation sociology. The book describes competing norms and beliefs among IMB stakeholders, demonstrating the capacity of conservation sociology to describe and interpret social phenomena in conservation work; explores power dynamics in the collaboration, using sociological theory to interpret significant events in IMB conservation; and analyzes the significance of time in IMB conservation while providing suggestions for applied conservation work based in sociological perspectives. The book accomplishes three main goals. First, it provides an account of details and events in Island Marble Butterfly conservation. Second, it defines, positions, and develops conservation sociology. Third, it demonstrates original research in conservation sociology, resulting in a deep look at the complexities of the social components of species conservation.

How to Actively Engage Our Students in the Language Classes

Edited by Carmela B. Scala, Rutgers University

In a world that moves at a speed that only a few years ago seemed impossible to achieve, our students are used to having the universe at their fingertips and breathing technology. As educators in the 21st century, we need to understand its impact on society, especially on our students’ learning experience, and find a way to make it work to our, and most importantly, their advantage. This edited volume presents some inspiring research in second language acquisition, focusing on active learning, cooperative and collaborative approach, and other innovative strategies to engage the students and promote learning.