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The United States Supreme Court is commonly thought to be an institution far removed from American public opinion. Yet nearly two-thirds of modern Supreme Court decisions reflect popular attitudes. Comparing over 500 Supreme Court decisions with timely nationwide poll questions since the mid-1930s, Thomas R. Marshall shows that most Supreme Court decisions agree with poll majorities or pluralities across time and across issues and often represent Americans' views to the same degree as federal policymakers. This book looks beyond the litigants, economic interests, social movements, organized interest groups, or units of governments typically involved and instead examines how well the Court or the justices represent Americans' views. Using nationwide public opinion, broken down by key subgroups, race, gender, education, and party affiliation, better describes exactly whom Supreme Court decisions and the justices' individual votes best represent. His book will be of interest to scholars in political science, legal studies, history, and sociology.

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.

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.

To be considered innocent is to be viewed as vulnerable to harm and worthy of protection from harm. An innocent person's pain is recognized, acknowledged, and addressed. Mediated Misogynoir: Erasing Black Women's and Girls' Innocence in the Public Imagination interrogates contemporary media culture to illuminate the ways the intersections of anti-blackness and misogyny, i.e., misogynoir, converge to obscure public perceptions of Black women and girls as people with any claim to innocence. When pained images of Black female bodies appear on media devices, the socio-political responses are telling, not only in their lack of urgency, but also in their inability to be read empathetically. By examining viral videos, memes, and recent film and television, Kalima Young makes a striking case for the need to create a new Black feminist media studies framework broad enough to hold the complexity and agency of Black women and girls in a digital age invested in framing them as inherently adulterated and impure.

Post-Theories in Literary and Cultural Studies brings to attention the post-theoretical discussions on the changing perceptions in literary and cultural studies. In four sections the volume presents essays that trace the engagement of post-theory with post-postmodernism, posthumanism, ethics, and politics.

The contributors to this volume ask whether democracy is universal or culturally bound, how the adoption of Western liberal models of democracy has hindered democratisation in Africa, and how indigenous African political thought can be utilised to design models of democracy suitable for twenty-first-century African countries.

How are natures and animals integrated inclusively into research projects through Multispecies Ethnography? While preceded by a vision that seeks to question holistically how scientists can integrate natures and animals into research projects through Multispecies Ethnography, this book focuses on inter- and multidisciplinary collaboration. From an examination of the interfaces between social and natural science-oriented disciplines, a complex view of natures, humans, and animals emerges. The insights into interdependencies of different disciplines illustrate the need for a Multispecies Ethnography to analyze HumansAnimalsNaturesCultures. While the methodology is innovative and currently not widespread, the application of Multispecies Ethnography in areas of research such as climate change, species extinction, or inequalities will allow new insights. These research debates are closely interwoven, and the methodological inclusion of the agency of natures and animals and the consideration of Indigenous Knowledge allow new insights of holistic multispecies research for the different disciplines. Multispecies Ethnography allows for positivist, innovative, attentive, reflexive and complex analyses of HumansAnimalsNaturesCultures.

Villa-Lobos and Modernism: The Apotheosis of Cannibal Music provides a new assessment of the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos in terms of his contributions to the Modernist Movement of the twentieth century. In this profound study, Ricardo Averbach elevates Cultural Cannibalism as a major manifestation of the Modernist aesthetics and Villa-Lobos as its top exponent in the music field. Villa-Lobos's anthropophagic appetite for multiple opposing aesthetics enlightens through the juxtaposition of contradictory elements, leaving a legacy of unmatched originality, a glittering kaleidoscope of sounds that draw from the radical power of Josephine Baker to the outrageous extravagance of Carmen Miranda, from Dada to Einstein's counterintuitive scientific findings, from folklorism to atonality. The constructed analyses use the works of Stravinsky as a familiar and popular touchstone for accessing Villa-Lobos as the leading exponent of an aesthetic movement that has been neglected due to a traditional Eurocentric view of Modernism. Averbach opens up new possibilities for the study of twentieth-century music, in general, while unveiling how much our present aesthetics owes to the Modernist ideas introduced by the Brazilian composer.

In a case study of urban biodiversity, Erik Kiviat and Kristi MacDonald present two decades of data and assessment of the habitats and biota of the Meadowlands. Urban Biodiversity: The Natural History of the New Jersey Meadowlands documents the mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, butterflies, bees, dragonflies, seed plants, mosses, and lichens of the Meadowlands region and their patterns of occurrence. The work records the natural history of an urban-industrial region, helping decision- makers foster the biodiversity that thrives in cities and giving planners tools to reduce the biological degradation that occurs with urbanization.

Unique in its cultural and religious makeup, medieval Iberia represented a crossroads of cultures. This crossroads was reflected in large and small ways. On a grand scale, we see the convergence of intellectual ideas and great innovations in agriculture and science. On a more intimate level, we see an intersection of cultures as reflected in habits of consumption. The acts of producing food, cooking, and eating demonstrate the political realities of the land: at times interdependent, and, at times, at odds. Food, as an archeological and anthropological tool, can help us understand a particular moment in time. In considering the nature of consumption, we may arrive at the heart of a culture. In Medieval Fare, the author explores food references found in a number of medieval Iberian texts in order to expand our knowledge of daily life in the Middle Ages. By examining the depiction of food and consumption, this pioneering study provides insight into the cultural, religious, and social complexities of medieval Iberia.

Sociology of Death and the American Indian examines dying, death, disposal, and bereavement practices and applies those concepts to selectAmerican Indian tribes historically and currently, supplemented with oral histories. The focus is that learning about other cultures can enhance the understanding of one's own culture by comparing traditional and modern societies. Gerry R. Cox addresses the centuries of injustices committed against American Indians that led to a neglect of learning about American Indian cultures and attempts to fill the gaps in knowledge of American Indian practices.

In Street Harassment as Everyday Violence, Melinda A. Mills investigates women's experiences with street harassment, recognizing this phenomenon as a form of everyday violence. The author follows feminist scholars to consider the ways that silence can potentially, if only partially, protect women from verbally assaultive men who harass women in public. This violence both reveals and conceals itself in the discourses of silence about and during street harassment. It maps onto and reflects the web of violence that proves persistent and difficult to dismantle. This work operates as an initial intervention, by way of recognition of street harassment as a problem that hides in plain sight.

This book analyzes Jewish tropes in popular science fiction ranging from Star Trek and Marvel to other prominent franchises. Sometimes the representation is subtle and thought-provoking; other times, it is limited to cliche and oversimplification of characters. The chapters in this collection examine the representation of Jewish characters in films and franchises including Superman, Lord of the Rings, The Mandalorian, The Twilight Zone, and more to shed light on the broad range of representations of the Jewish experience in popular science fiction and fantasy.

Critical literacy research has highlighted the complexities associated with integrating critical literacy theory with classroom practice, recognizing the intersection between critical literacy and culturally sustaining pedagogies, and the resistance faced by educators as they create spaces for courageous conversations, critical engagement with text, and progressive text creation. Although the complexities of moving from theory to practice are more understood than they previously were, how educators navigate the inherent tensions of fostering and sustaining a critical practice is less clear.This volume defines 'educator' as a PreK-12 classroom teacher, or as a teacher educator whose work is predominantly associated with university-based teacher education. Their roles and responsibilities are diverse. Through an unpacking of the curricula, courses, programs, and professional learning spaces in which educators operate, this edited volume seeks to answer these questions:¿How do educators develop a critical practice of their own?¿How do educators navigate areas of resistance?¿How do educators sustain their practice in the face of resistance?¿How do educators address concerns of parents, colleagues, administrators, and stakeholders ?¿How do educators link social justice issues to critical literacy/critical pedagogy?

According to originalism, the meaning of a text is determined at the time of its writing. Originalism in Theology and Law explores the similarities and differences between the theological application of this idea to the Bible and its legal application to the American Constitution.