What is the explanation for American students' comparatively mediocre academic performance? A Mirror for Americans finds part of it in how they are taught in primary schools. Comparisons with East Asian teaching are supplied by 50 years of research findings. Grove asks not that we copy East Asian teaching approaches, but that we use them as a mirror to gain insights into typically American approaches and their underlying values, which are handicapping our children's learning.

A Mirror for Americans

Politics & Social Sciences

Grove, Cornelius

Social Sciences

Rowman & Littlefield International

Smarter Decision-Making (Organizational Management, 1)

Business & Money

Pepe, Louis

Management & Leadership

Pyropolitics: When the World is Ablaze

From the books and heretics burnt on the pyres of the Inquisition to self-immolations at protest rallies, from the massive burning of oil on the global scale to inflammatory speech, from the imagery of revolutionary sparks ready to ignite the spirits of the oppressed to car bombings in the Middle East, fire proves to be an indispensable element of the political. To account for this elemental source of heat and light, Pyropolitics delineates a semantico-discursive field, replete with the literal and metaphorical mentions and uses of fires, flames, sparks, immolations, incinerations, and burning in political theory and practices. Relying on classical political theory, literature, theology, contemporary philosophy, and an analysis of current events, Michael Marder argues that geo-politics, or the politics of the Earth, has always had an unstable, at once shadowy and blinding, underside—pyropolitics, or the politics of fire. If this obscure double of geopolitics is, increasingly, dictating the rules of the game today, then it is crucial to learn to speak its language, to discern its manifestations, and to project where our world ablaze is heading.

MARDER, MICHAEL

Philosophy

In David Hume’s science of human nature each and every self is located by passions that bind it to groups, repel it from other groups, and rank it on a hierarchy: we call this discovery a ‘topology of passions’. These ranked selves and groups provide the matter of what he called ‘government’, a neutral model of political action designed to avoid the malady of faction and catapult Scotland out of feudalism into a glorious future as a commercial society. Government is to be assisted in this project by the new discipline of political economy, a discipline blind beyond its measures of privileged variables – the volume of trade, interest rates, wage levels. It is such measures that will justify the destruction of any obstacle to the commercial passions. To govern – a new kind of action for a new epoch – is to destroy and liberate. But ever since Hume governments have fallen apart because they fail to take into account the complexity of their societies as topologies of passions. It is through an analysis of Hume’s account of the English Revolution in his History of England that we find an alternative to government: in his report on the impact and danger of another model of political action – democratic enthusiasm – wherein to act is to incarnate an idea of commonality. It is also in Hume’s History that we discover the springs and workings of fortune in politics: models of political action woven together and unravelling only to be re-woven, any ‘ought’ or ‘necessity’ foundering in a sea of contingency. The efficacy of politics is revealed: speech acts sown together with other speech acts as they shape our experience of time.

Destroy and Liberate

Feltham Associate Professor of Philosophy American University of Paris, Oliver

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the arguments relating to the extent and manner to which social influences enable epistemic agents.

Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency: Decentralizing Epistemic Agency (Collective Studies in Knowledge and Society)

The Spanish Civil War left a legacy of destruction, resentment and deep ideological divisions in a country that was attempting to recover from economic stagnation and social inequality. After Franco’s victory, the repression and purge that ensued immersed Spain in a spiral of fear and silence which continued long after the dictator’s death, through ‘the pact of oblivion’ that was observed during the transition to democracy. Memories of the Spanish Civil War: Conflict and Community in Rural Spain attempts to break this silence by recovering the local memories of survivors of the Civil War and the early years of Franco’s dictatorship. Combining oral testimony gathered in one Andalusian village, with archival research, this ethnographic study approaches the expression of memory as an important site of socio-political struggle.

Memories of the Spanish Civil War

History

Sabido, Ruth

Europe

In all cultures and times, the poetic imagination has fed on the natural attributes of islands. An island is either a destination, or a home, or a place of exile and imprisonment, or simply a place to sojourn. It is an ideal vehicle for journeys treated as allegories, or for acts of finding that turn into acts of losing, or the reverse transformation. An island is not a continent; yet it can be an archipelago. An island is both a place in itself and a pretext for imaginings that need a local habitation and a name. It can give relief, and pleasure; or it can frustrate, isolate, and negate. Above all, it both invites and resists - or contains or constrains - the imagination. Poetryand Islands explores how islands become repositories of human longings and desires, a locus for some of our deepest fears and fantasies. It balances historical and geographical reference with a selective approach to poems and poets in English, and in translations into English. The study of particular poems in which islands figure in exemplary ways is balanced by a more detailed discussion of the poets who have played a major role in shaping human responses to islands on a global scale.

Poetry and Islands (Rethinking the Island)

Patke Professor of English at the National University of Singapore and Professor, Rajeev S.

Reference

Food, Text and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean

How do diasporic writers negotiate their identities through and with food? What tensions emerge between the local and the global, between the foodways of the past and of the present? How are concepts of culinary ‘tradition’ and ‘authenticity’ articulated in Caribbean cookery writing? Drawing on a rich and varied tradition of Caribbean writings, Food, Text &amp; Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean shows how the creation of food and the creation of narrative are intimately linked cultural practices which can tell us much about each other. Historically, Caribbean writers have explored, defined and re-affirmed their different cultural, ethnic, caste, class and gender identities by writing about what, when and how they eat. Images of feeding, feasting, fasting and other food rituals and practices, as articulated in a range of Caribbean writings, constitute a powerful force of social cohesion and cultural continuity. Moreover, food is often central to the question of what it means to be Caribbean, especially in diasporic and globalized contexts. Suitable for undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars, the book offers the first study of food and writing in an Anglophone Caribbean context.

Literature & Fiction

Welsh, Sarah Lawson

History & Criticism

Islamic Modernities in Southeast Asia: Exploring Indonesian Popular and Visual Culture (Asian Cultural Studies: Transnational and Dialogic Approaches)

Demonstrates how new Islamic modernities are being negotiated and constructed through popular and visual culture in Indonesia.

Schmidt, Leonie

Theorising Literary Islands is a literary and cultural study of both how and why the trope of the island functions within contemporary popular Robinsonade narratives. It traces the development of Western “islomania” – or our obsession with islands – from its origins in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe right up to contemporary Robinsonade texts, focusing predominantly on American and European representations of fictionalized Pacific Island topographies in contemporary literature, film, television, and other media. Theorising Literary Islands argues that the ubiquity of island landscapes within the popular imagination belies certain ideological and cultural anxieties, and posits that the emergence of a Western popular culture tradition can largely be traced through the development of the Robinsonade genre, and through early European and American fascination with the Pacific region.

Theorising Literary Islands (Rethinking the Island)

Kinane, Ian

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