In the early years of the Cold War, Western nations increasingly adopted strategies of public diplomacy involving popular music. While the diplomatic use of popular music was initially limited to such genres as jazz, the second half of the 20th century saw a growing presence of various popular genres in diplomatic contexts, including rock, pop, bluegrass, flamenco, funk, disco, and hip-hop, among others. This volume illuminates the interrelation of popular music and public diplomacy from a transnational and transdisciplinary angle. The contributions argue that, as popular music has been a crucial factor in international relations, its diplomatic use has substantially impacted the global musical landscape of the 20th and 21st centuries.
What can we learn from the way artists live and operate in the world? This is one of the questions that Nietzsche asks himself throughout the course of his work, although it is not one for which he is most famous. In its answer, the question functions as a swinging incessant movement that oscillates between a highly critical analysis of dogmas and prejudices of the Western philosophical tradition and an equally profound recognition of how important it is for each of us to cling to a system of certainties and truths that are but illusions necessary to life. Art speaks to us of this perpetual transit from the brutality of the real to the enchantment of an invented world and teaches us how to move between both extremes. Beyond stereotypes and false myths, the crucial nodes of Nietzsche’s thought are shown in a different light, demonstrating once again the complexity of a philosophy that resists all simplifications.
Based on ethnographic research conducted in 'Starlets', a lap-dancing club in the North of England, this book delves into what is often seen as the 'deviant', and 'stigmatized' world of lap-dancing. As well as the relationships between dancers, the author offers a unique insider's account of lap-dancing club culture, having worked as a lap-dancer both prior to, and during, the study. The book tells a fascinating tale of the author's experiences working as a lap dancer and the insights this has provided. This book projects a textured picture of working, socializing and living as a lap-dancer by following the dancer from the beginning of her career, to her eventual exit; providing a fluid and comprehensive examination of the occupation of lap-dancing. As well as building on the popular themes of 'dancer motivation', 'dancer exploitation/empowerment' and risk already embedded in existing literature, this book also offers completely new insight into this industry by drawing attention to the occupational subculture of which lap-dancers at 'Starlets' were found to be a part. This book is recommended for anyone studying or researching in this field.
The new edition of Cops, Teachers, Counselors furthers the exploration of forces that shape the contours of frontline work. This line of inquiry is at the heart of street-level bureaucracy research, a field of study cutting across disciplines, including public administration, political science, social work, law and society, education, and criminal justice. The oft-cited 2003 edition pioneered a qualitative method of inquiry using workers’ own voices and storytelling about fairness in the delivery of services. This NSF-supported field research reveals the ways workers engage in moral judgments, more than implementing laws and policies, to account for their decisions and actions. The new edition wraps an expanded framing around the original chapters, while maintaining a lively, approachable presentation style. It takes on a more enriched perspective of legality than the original, while retaining a focus on frontline work as a powerful source of cultural ordering. In addition to examining workers’ stories of encounters, attention is given to the agency of the governed during interactional moments, the power dynamics in play during both interpersonal and group encounters, and patterns of practice that converge across distinctive service domains. The original edition describes two narratives that shape frontline workers’ decisional judgments and the interplay between legality and morality: the state-agent and citizen-agent narratives. This edition adds the knowledge-agent narrative that stresses the importance of professional and field learning to decisional judgments. The book examines routine encounters of cops, teachers, and counselors with diverse publics when questions of justice and fairness are at play. This new edition speaks to contemporary issues at a time when frontline workers gained broad recognition for their heroic contributions to communities during the Covid 19 pandemic, as well as sustained condemnation for their embodiment of the brutal expression of racialized state power in police actions. The authors conclude with a focus on the significance of place and trust in building social inclusion on the frontlines of public service.
Illustrates the changing significance of what it means to be educated, rural, and ethnic in Southwest China. Winner of the 2017 American Educational Research Association’s Division B Outstanding Book Recognition Award Winner of the 2017 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award In today’s China, education is translated into both acute social desires and profound disenchantment. Shanghai’s stellar performance in the recent Program for International Student Assessment paints a celebratory image of educational success yet tells only a partial story. For many in rural China who are schooled yet prepared only for factory sweatshops, education remains an elusive ideal and offers a hollowed promise of social mobility. Fabricating an Educational Miracle laces together complex accounts of how compulsory education produces dilemmas and possibilities in village schools in Southwest China. Drawing from interviews, participant observations, oral history, and archival research in a Miao and a Dong village-town in Qiandongnan Prefecture, Guizhou Province, this book examines the manifold and contradictory agendas that have captured rural ethnic schooling at a crossroads. Jinting Wu is Assistant Professor of Education Policy at the University of Macau.
German scholar and thinker Friedrich Nietzsche began his career as a linguist and philologist, but over time, his work became increasingly philosophical in its scope. He came to embrace a radical point of view that prized personal freedom and choice over virtually everything else. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche explores the triumphs and tragic shortfalls of human nature in an eminently readable series of aphorisms and short vignettes.
This book investigates issues of translation and survival in diasporic and transcultural literature, combining Chinese and Western theories of translation to discuss the centrifugal and centripetal forces that are inherent in diasporic Chinese writers. Cutting across philosophy, semiotics, translation studies and diasporic writing, it the book tackles the complexity of translation as a key tool to re-read the dynamics of Sino-Anglo literary encounters that reset East-West parameters. Focusing on a range of specialized areas of cultural translation sand China-related writings, this book is a key read for scholars of translation and cross-cultural writings, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, American and Australian literature studies, and global Chinese literature studies.
In the unstable economy of the nineteenth-century, few Americans could feel secure. Paper money made values less tangible, while a series of financial manias, panics, and depressions clouded everyday life with uncertainty and risk. In this groundbreaking study, Andrew Lawson traces the origins of American realism to a new structure of feeling: the desire of embattled and aspiring middle class for a more solid and durable reality. The story begins with New England authors Susan Warner and Rose Terry Cooke, whose gentry-class families became insolvent in the wake of the 1837 Panic, and moves to the western frontier, where the early careers of Rebecca Harding Davis and William Dean Howells were shaped by a constant struggle for social position and financial security. We see how the pull of downward social mobility affected even the outwardly successful, bourgeois family of Henry James in New York, while the drought-stricken wheat fields of Iowa and South Dakota produced the most militant American realist, Hamlin Garland. For these writers, realism offered to stabilize an uncertain world by capturing it with a new sharpness and accuracy. It also revealed a new cast of social actors-factory workers, slaves, farm laborers, the disabled, and the homeless, all victims of an unregulated market. Combining economic history and literary analysis to powerful effect, Downwardly Mobile shows how the fluctuating fortunes of the American middle class forced the emergence of a new kind of literature, while posing difficult political choices about how the middle class might remedy its precarious condition.
This volume contributes to the fields of lyric poetry and poetics (especially poetic form), aesthetics, and German literature by intervening in debates on the social functions, cognitive and emotional effects, and the value of poetry. It builds on, and moves beyond, previous theories of rhythm to tie meter more particularly to the specificities of poetic language in blending of embodied responses, cultural situations, and linguistic particularities. The book examines the German-language tradition across three centuries, arguing that the interdisciplinarity and richness of metrical theory and practice emerge in the heterogeneity of poetry and its defenders in their specific historical moments. Focusing on Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Durs Grünbein, the book contextualizes each in the metrical and aesthetic debates of his epoch, showing how questions of meter are linked with overarching poetic goals such as the relationship between form and meaning, the adaptation of the Classical past for German literature, and the ways poetry's sounds work in the body. It argues that Klopstock's, Nietzsche's, and Grünbein's metrical theory and practice offer valuable insights for thinking about the ways poetry works and why it matters.
