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Academics in Action!: A Model for Community-Engaged Research, Teaching, and Service

Sandra L. Barnes, Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, Bernadette Doykos, Nina C. Martin, and Alison McGuire (eds)

The edited volume describes a multi-disciplinary model where students and faculty work with communities, learn from them, and contribute the fruits of theory and research to solving community ... More

The edited volume describes a multi-disciplinary model where students and faculty work with communities, learn from them, and contribute the fruits of theory and research to solving community problems. It is a model where theory and action span multiple ecological levels from individuals and small group to organizations and social structures. The communities of engagement range from local neighborhoods and schools to national policy and international development. These forms of engagement require carefully crafted institutional structures to support them. This volume offers examples of community-engaged theory, scholarship, and action, and the structures that foster them within a research university. The examples are drawn from the Department of Human and Organizational Development at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University, whose programs, from undergraduate service learning and internships to doctoral training in community research and action, embody the vision of The Academy in Action! The chapters document how authentic partnerships between the academy and the community result in meaningful research and praxis.Less

Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews

Jay Geller

Given the vast inventory of verbal and visual images of nonhuman animals (pigs, dogs, vermin, rodents, apes, etc.) disseminated for millennia to debase and bestialize Jews (the Bestiarium Judaicum), ... More

Given the vast inventory of verbal and visual images of nonhuman animals (pigs, dogs, vermin, rodents, apes, etc.) disseminated for millennia to debase and bestialize Jews (the Bestiarium Judaicum), this work asks: What is at play when Jewish-identified writers employ such figures in their narratives and poems? Bringing together Jewish cultural studies (examining how Jews have negotiated Jew-Gentile difference) and critical animal studies (analyzing the functions served by asserting human-animal difference), this monograph focuses on the writings of primarily Germanophone authors, including Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, Gertrud Kolmar, H. Leivick, Felix Salten, and Curt Siodmak. It ferrets out of their nonhuman-animal constructions their responses to the bestial answers upon which the Jewish and animal questions converged and by which varieties of the species “Jew” were depicted. Along with close textual analysis, it examines both personal and social contexts of each work. It explores how several writers attempted to subvert the identification of the Jew-animal by rendering indeterminable the human-animal “Great Divide” being played out on actual Jewish bodies and in Jewish-Gentile relations as well as how others endeavored to work-through identifications with those bestial figures differently: e.g., Salten’s Bambi novels posed the question of “whether a doe is sometimes just a female deer,” while Freud, in his case studies, manifestly disaggregated Jews and animals even as he, perhaps, animalized the human. This work also critically engages new-historical (M. Schmidt), postcolonial (J. Butler and J. Hanssen), and continental philosophic (G. Agamben) appropriations of the conjunction of Jew and animal.Less

Celebricities: Media Culture and the Phenomenology of Gadget Commodity Life

Anthony Curtis Adler

Taking its departure from a phenomenological encounter with television—indeed a rethinking of the phenomenological method in terms of the way in which the experience of television disarticulates ... More

Taking its departure from a phenomenological encounter with television—indeed a rethinking of the phenomenological method in terms of the way in which the experience of television disarticulates life, opposing my life to the life that is not mine to live and yet mine not to live—this book attempts to illuminate the ontology of late capitalism, focusing on celebrity culture and the rise of the pluripotent gadget. While Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein in Being and Time will serve as the starting point, the theorization of the gadget in particular proceeds by means of bringing Heidegger’s ontology into dialogue with the Marxist theory of the commodity and Althusser’s treatment of ideology. Gadget-commodity-life will come to be understood in terms of a reproduction of the “alethic,” rather than merely ideological, conditions of production. For production to remain possible it will become increasingly necessary to have the commodity itself “stage” the play of concealment-unconcealment as the ontological basis of production. Whereas the first part of this book develops a theoretical frame work through a sustained argument, the second part will attempt to “screen” television, celebrity, and gadget-commodity-life itself through a series of fragmentary theoretical encounters. These will attempt, moreover, to show how the pop-culture objects of late capitalism exist only through the possibility of a theoretical encounter with them—or, in other words, exist as phenomenological.Less

Figuring Violence: Affective Investments in Perpetual War

Rebecca A. Adelman

Figuring Violence catalogs the affects that define the latter stages of the war on terror and the imaginative work that underpins them. These affects—apprehension, affection, admiration, gratitude, ... More

Figuring Violence catalogs the affects that define the latter stages of the war on terror and the imaginative work that underpins them. These affects—apprehension, affection, admiration, gratitude, pity, and righteous anger—are far more pleasurable and durable than their predecessors. Hence, they are deeply compatible with the ambitions of a state embroiling itself in a perpetual and essentially unwinnable war. Surveying the cultural landscape of this sprawling conflict, Figuring Violence reveals the varied mechanisms by which these affects have been militarized. This book tracks their convergences around six types of beings: civilian children, military children, military spouses, veterans with PTSD and TBI, Guantánamo detainees, and military dogs. All of these groups have become preferred objects of sentiment in wartime public culture, but they also have in common their status as political subjects who are partially or fully unknowable. They become visible to outsiders through a range of mediated and imaginative practices that are ostensibly motivated by concern or compassion. However, these practices actually function to reduce these beings to abstracted figures and so make them easy targets for affective investment. This is a paradoxical and conditional form of recognition that eclipses the actual beings upon whom those figures are patterned, silencing their political subjectivities and obscuring their suffering. As a result, they are erased and rendered hypervisible at once. Figuring Violence demonstrates that this dynamic ultimately propagates the very militarism that begets their victimization.Less

Freud's Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer

Lana Lin

Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects examines the vulnerabilities of the human body, in particular how cancer disrupts feelings of bodily integrity and agency. Employing psychoanalytic and literary ... More

Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects examines the vulnerabilities of the human body, in particular how cancer disrupts feelings of bodily integrity and agency. Employing psychoanalytic and literary analysis of atypical autopathographies, the book tracks three exemplary figures, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, poet Audre Lorde, and literary and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Freud’s sixteen-year ordeal with a prosthetic jaw, the result of oral cancer, demonstrates the powers and failures of prosthetic objects in warding off physical and psychic fragmentation. Lorde’s life writing reveals how the loss of a breast to cancer is experienced as yet another attack directed toward her racially and sexually vilified body. Sedgwick’s memoir and breast cancer advice column negotiate her morbidity and mortality by disseminating a public discourse of love and pedagogy. Freud’s Jaw suggests that violences stemming from social, cultural, and biological environments condition the burden of surviving in proximity to one’s mortality. Drawing on psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s concept of “reparation,” wherein constructive forces are harnessed to repair damage to internal psychic objects, Freud’s Jaw proposes that the prospect of imminent destruction paradoxically incites creativity. The afflicted are obliged to devise means to reinstate, at least temporarily, their destabilized physical and psychic unity through creative reparative projects such as love or writing. The book concludes with an analysis of reparative efforts at the rival Freud Museums. The disassembled Freudian archive, like the subjectivities-in-dissolution upon which the book focuses, shows how the labor of integration is tethered to persistent discontinuities.Less

Mapping Memory: Visuality, Affect, and Embodied Politics in the Americas

Kaitlin M. Murphy

In Mapping Memory: Visuality, Affect, and Embodied Politics in the Americas, Kaitlin M. Murphy analyzes a range of visual memory practices that have emerged in opposition to political discourses and ... More

In Mapping Memory: Visuality, Affect, and Embodied Politics in the Americas, Kaitlin M. Murphy analyzes a range of visual memory practices that have emerged in opposition to political discourses and visual economies that suppress certain subjects and overlook past and present human rights abuses. From the Southern Cone to Central America and the US-Mexico borderlands, and across documentary film, photography, performance, memory sites, and new media, she compares how these visual texts use memory as a form of contemporary intervention. Interweaving visual and performance theory with memory and affect, Murphy develops new frameworks for analyzing how visual culture performs as an embodied agent of memory and witnessing. She argues that visuality is inherently performative; and analyzing the performative elements, or strategies, of visual texts—such as embodiment, reperformance, reenactment, haunting, and the performance of material objects and places—elucidates how memory is both anchored into and extracted from specific bodies, objects, and places. Murphy progressively develops the theory of memory mapping, defined as the visual process of representing the affective, sensorial, polyvocal, and temporally layered relationship between past and present, anchored within the specificities of place. Ultimately, by exploring how memory is “mapped” across a range of sites and mediums, Murphy argues that memory mapping is a visual strategy for producing new temporal and spatial arrangements of knowledge and memory that function as counter-practices to official narratives that often neglect or designate as transgressive certain memories or experiences.Less

Oh Capitano!: Celso Cesare Moreno - Adventurer, Cheater, and Scoundrel on Four Continents

Rudolph J. Vecoli and Francesco Durante

Donna R. Gabaccia (ed.)

Italian adventurer and sea captain Celso Cesare Moreno traveled the world lying, scheming, and building an extensive patron/client network to establish his reputation as a middleman and person of ... More

Italian adventurer and sea captain Celso Cesare Moreno traveled the world lying, scheming, and building an extensive patron/client network to establish his reputation as a middleman and person of significance. Through his machinations, Moreno became a critical player in the expansion of western trade and imperialism in Asia, the trafficking of migrant workers and children in the Atlantic, the conflicts of Americans and Native Hawaiians over the fate of Hawaii, and the imperial competitions of French, British, Italian, and American governments in an important era of imperial expansion during the nineteenth century. This book teases out Moreno's enormous peculiarities and fascination as well as his significance. It examines how he repeatedly sought a role at the center of a globalizing world with gusto and had no qualms about lying or betraying others. Dragged by his uncontrollable polemical passions, the old Captain died alone, unloved by anyone and with no meaningful relations to others. With its focus on Moreno, this book illustrates some of the most puzzling cultural traits of emigrant Italian elites. Called a “carpetbagger,” “land pirate,” “extinct volcano,” among many other derogatory monikers, Celso emerges in this fascinating biography as a multifaceted, chameleon-like personality not reducible to a single epithet.Less

Sabato Rodia's Towers in Watts: Art, Migrations, Development

Luisa Del Giudice (ed.)

The extraordinary Watts Towers were created over the course of three decades by a determined, single-minded artist, Sabato Rodia. Now a National Historic Landmark and internationally renowned ... More

The extraordinary Watts Towers were created over the course of three decades by a determined, single-minded artist, Sabato Rodia. Now a National Historic Landmark and internationally renowned destination, the Watts Towers in Los Angeles are both a personal artistic expression and a collective symbol of Nuestro Pueblo—Our Town/Our People. Featuring fresh and innovative examinations, this book is a much-anticipated revisitation of the man and his towers. In 1919, Sabato Rodia purchased a triangular plot of land in a multiethnic, working-class, semi-rural district. He set to work on an unusual building project in his own yard. By night, Rodia dreamed and excogitated, and by day he built. He experimented with form, color, texture, cement mixtures, and construction techniques. He built, tore down, and re-built. As an artist completely possessed by his work, he was often derided as an incomprehensible crazy man. Providing a multifaceted, holistic understanding of Rodia, the towers, and the cultural/social/physical environment within which the towers and their maker can be understood, this book compiles essays from twenty authors, offering perspectives from the arts, the communities involved in the preservation and interpretation of the towers, and the academy. The Watts Towers are wondrous objects of art and architecture as well as the expression and embodiment of the resolve of a singular artistic genius to do something great. But they also recount the heroic civic efforts (art and social action) to save them, both of which continue to this day to evoke awe and inspiration.Less

The Watchdog Still Barks: How Accountability Reporting Evolved for the Digital Age

Beth Knobel

Perhaps no other function of a free press is as important as the watchdog role. It is easier for politicians to get away with abusing power, wasting public funds, and making poor decisions if the ... More

Perhaps no other function of a free press is as important as the watchdog role. It is easier for politicians to get away with abusing power, wasting public funds, and making poor decisions if the press is not shining its light with what is termed “accountability reporting.” This need has become especially clear as the American press has come under direct attack for carrying out its watchdog duties. This book presents a study of how this most important form of journalism came of age in the digital era at American newspapers. The book examines the front pages of nine newspapers, located across the United States, for clues on how papers addressed the watchdog role as the advent of the Internet transformed journalism. It shows how papers of varying sizes and ownership structures around the country marshaled resources for accountability reporting despite significant financial and technological challenges. Although the American newspaper industry contracted significantly during the 1990s and 2000s due to the digital transformation, the data collected in this book shows that the papers held fast to the watchdog role. The newspapers all endured budget and staff cuts during the 20 years studied as paid circulation and advertising dropped, but the amount of deep watchdog reporting on their front pages generally increased over this time. The book contains interviews with editors of the newspapers studied, who explain why they are staking their papers' futures on the one thing that American newspapers still do better than any other segment of the media—watchdog and investigative reporting.Less