Books about Theorizing from Amazon.com

“The innovative essays in this volume . . . demonstrat[e] the potential of the perspective of the affects in a wide range of fields and with a variety of methodological approaches. Some of the essays . . . use fieldwork to investigate the functions of affects—among organized sex workers, health care workers, and in the modeling industry. Others employ the discourses of microbiology, thermodynamics, information sciences, and cinema studies to rethink the body and the affects in terms of technology. Still others explore the affects of trauma in the context of immigration and war. And throughout all the essays run serious theoretical reflections on the powers of the affects and the political possibilities they pose for research and practice.”—Michael Hardt, from the foreword

In the mid-1990s, scholars turned their attention toward the ways that ongoing political, economic, and cultural transformations were changing the realm of the social, specifically that aspect of it described by the notion of affect: pre-individual bodily forces, linked to autonomic responses, which augment or diminish a body’s capacity to act or engage with others. This “affective turn” and the new configurations of bodies, technology, and matter that it reveals, is the subject of this collection of essays. Scholars based in sociology, cultural studies, science studies, and women’s studies illuminate the movement in thought from a psychoanalytically informed criticism of subject identity, representation, and trauma to an engagement with information and affect; from a privileging of the organic body to an exploration of nonorganic life; and from the presumption of equilibrium-seeking closed systems to an engagement with the complexity of open systems under far-from-equilibrium conditions. Taken together, these essays suggest that attending to the affective turn is necessary to theorizing the social.

Contributors. Jamie “Skye” Bianco, Grace M. Cho, Patricia Ticineto Clough, Melissa Ditmore, Ariel Ducey, Deborah Gambs, Karen Wendy Gilbert, Greg Goldberg, Jean Halley, Hosu Kim, David Staples, Craig Willse , Elizabeth Wissinger , Jonathan R. Wynn.
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Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of ArchitecturalTheory collects in a single volume the most significant essays on architectural theory of the last thirty years.

A dynamic period of reexamination of the discipline, the postmodern eraproduced widely divergent and radical viewpoints on issues of making, meaning, history, and the city. Among the paradigms presented arearchitectural postmodernism, phenomenology, semiotics, poststructuralism, deconstruction, and feminism.

By gathering these influential articles from a vast array of books and journals into a comprehensive anthology, Kate Nesbitt has created a resource of great value. Indispensable to professors and students of architecture and architectural theory, Theorizing a New Agenda also serves practitioners and the general public, as Nesbitt provides an overview, a thematic structure, and a critical introduction to each essay.

The list of authors in Theorizing a New Agenda reads like a "Who's Who" of contemporary architectural thought: Tadao Ando, Giulio Carlo Argan, Alan Colquhoun, Jacques Derrida, Peter Eisenman, Marco Frascari, Kenneth Frampton, Diane Ghirardo, Vittorio Gregotti, Karsten Harries, Rem Koolhaas, Christian Norberg-Schulz, Aldo Rossi, Colin Rowe, Thomas Schumacher, Ignasi de Sol -Morales Rubi , Bernard Tschumi, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and Anthony Vidler. A bibliography and notes on all the contributors are also included..
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Bringing together the key essays that have constituted this field since its inception and that point the way toward its future, Theorizing Diaspora is a central resource for understanding diaspora as an emergent and contested theoretical space.

• Anthologizes the most influential and critically received essays that have shaped the trajectory of diaspora studies.
  
• Offers classic statements that have defined the field by scholars including Appadurai, Gilroy, Radhakrishnan, and Hall.
  
• Presents divergent strains of multiple diasporas, including Chinese, Black African, Jewish, South Asian, Latin American, and Caribbean.
  
• Reflects the modalities and methodologies of scholars across the humanities and social sciences.
  
• Includes a postscript on diaspora in cyberspace and an extensive bibliography.

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The concept of "funds of knowledge" is based on a simple premise: people are competent and have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge The claim in this book is that first-hand research experiences with families allow one to document this competence and knowledge, and that such engagement provides many possibilities for positive pedagogical actions. Drawing from both Vygotskian and neo-sociocultural perspectives in designing a methodology that views the everyday practices of language and action as constructing knowledge, the funds of knowledge approach facilitates a systematic and powerful way to represent communities in terms of the resources they possess and how to harness them for classroom teaching. This book accomplishes three objectives: It gives readers the basic methodology and techniques followed in the contributors' funds of knowledge research; it extends the boundaries of what these researchers have done; and it explores the applications to classroom practice that can result from teachers knowing the communities in which they work. In a time when national educational discourses focus on system reform and wholesale replicability across school sites, this book offers a counter-perspective stating that instruction must be linked to students' lives, and that details of effective pedagogy should be linked to local histories and community contexts. This approach should not be confused with parent participation programs, although that is often a fortuitous consequence of the work described. It is also not an attempt to teach parents "how to do school" although that could certainly be an outcome if the parents so desired. Instead, the funds of knowledge approach attempts to accomplish something that may be even more challenging: to alter the perceptions of working-class or poor communities by viewing their households primarily in terms of their strengths and resources, their defining pedagogical characteristics. Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms is a critically important volume for all teachers and teachers-to-be, and for researchers and graduate students of language, culture, and education..
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"Each chapter takes on the issue at hand with a considerable degree of rigor that incorporates extensive literature reviews, theoretical backgrounds, and detailed explanations of the development of each theoretical perspective."
-Adrian Holliday, Canterbury Christ Church University, North Holmes Campus, UK

There are several approaches to incorporating culture into communication theories. First, culture can be integrated with the communication process in the theories of communication. Second, theories can be designed to describe how communication varies across cultures. And third, theories can be generated to explain communication between people from different cultures. In Theorizing About Intercultural Communication, editor William B. Gudykunstbrings together key theories that have shaped and influenced human intercultural communication.

Theorizing About Intercultural Communication provides an excellent overview of the major theories currently in use and examines how these theories will also support the foundation for future research in this area. Contributors to this text include individuals who actually developed the theories covered in the book. Each contributor highlights the evolution, development, and application of the theory to provide a thorough and contemporary view of the field.

Key Features

• First student text on intercultural communication theories with consistent chapter organization, headings, and pedagogy to aid comprehension and allow for theories to be easily compared and contrasted
• Intercultural communication theories are discussed by those who developed them to provide a firsthand look at how these theories originated
• An introductory chapter and part overviews highlight the importance of studying and using intercultural communication theories
• Each theory’s testing and application is emphasized to demonstrate how the theory can be implemented
• Several new hypotheses on topics such as co-cultural and dialectical concepts are examined, in addition to modifications of long-standing theories, making this the most up-to-date text on intercultural communication theories

Theorizing About Intercultural Communication is an excellent text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses on Intercultural Communication, Communication Theory, and Cultural Studies.

(20080528).
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This book is about explaining surveillance processes and practices in contemporary society. Surveillance studies is a relatively new multi-disciplinary enterprise that aims to understand who watches who, how the watched participate in and sometimes question their surveillance, why surveillance occurs, and with what effects. This book brings together some of the world's leading surveillance scholars to discuss the "why" question. The field has been dominated, since the groundbreaking work of Michel Foucault, by the idea of the panopticon and this book explores why this metaphor has been central to discussions of surveillance, what is fruitful in the panoptic approach, and what other possible approaches can throw better light on the phenomena in question. Since the advent of networked computer databases, and especially since 9/11, questions of surveillance have come increasingly to the forefront of democratic, political and policy debates in the global north (and to an extent in the global south). Civil liberties, democratic participation and privacy are some of the issues that are raised by these developments. But little progress can be made in responding to these issues without an adequate understanding of how, how well and whether or not surveillance works. This book explores the theoretical questions in a way that is grounded in and attuned to empirical realities..
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"Theorizing the City has become fundamental reading for those students of urban society and culture who wish to better understand twentieth-century city forms and spaces, as well as why certain race, gender, age, and class inequalities continue to be manifested today." -- Alejandro Lugo, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "Using rich comparative material, this volume presents an intriguing anthropological vision of how cities are shaped. A major addition to a comparative anthropology of cities." --Judith Goode, co-editor of The New Poverty Studies "These informative essays make clear that anthropology has much to offer to urban theory and policy debates." --Nancy Foner, author of From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration Anthopological perspectives are not often represented in urban studies, even though many anthropologists have been contributing actively to theory and research on urban poverty, racism, globalization, and architecture. Theorizing the City corrects this omission. Following a brief history of urban anthroplogy, emphasizing developments in the field during the 1990s, this volume presents twelve ethnographies of major cities in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Five images of the city--the divided city, the contested city, the global city, the modernist city, and the postmodern city--serve as frameworks for the essays. Each section highlights current research trends such as poststructural studies of race, class, and gender in the urban context; political economic studies of transnational culture; and studies of the symbolic meanings and social production or urban spaces. Setha M. Low is professor of environmental psychology andanthopology and director of the Public Space Research Group at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture..
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Historically, religious scriptures are defined as holy texts that are considered to be beyond the abilities of the layperson to interpret. Their content is most frequently analyzed by clerics who do not question the underlying political or social implications of the text, but use the writing to convey messages to their congregations about how to live a holy existence. In Western society, moreover, what counts as scripture is generally confined to the Judeo-Christian Bible, leaving the voices of minorities, as well as the holy texts of faiths from Africa and Asia, for example, unheard.

In this innovative collection of essays that aims to turn the traditional bible-study definition of scriptures on its head, Vincent L. Wimbush leads an in-depth look at the social, cultural, and racial meanings invested in these texts. Contributors hail from a wide array of academic fields and geographic locations and include such noted academics as Susan Harding, Elisabeth Shüssler Fiorenza, and William L. Andrews.

Purposefully transgressing disciplinary boundaries, this ambitious book opens the door to different interpretations and critical orientations, and in doing so, allows an ultimately humanist definition of scriptures to emerge..
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The goal of this book is to encourage thinking about criminal justice. What theories direct the behaviors of the police, the courts, and corrections administrators? Are due process rights the foundation of actions, or is the control of crime an overriding concern? Are criminal justice personnel motivated by the need to diagnose and treat the individual offender, or are classification and management of groups the primary focus? Which goals are paramount: retribution, treatment, safety, social control, efficiency? What value choices guide theories? Does a bureaucratic system insure impartiality, or is it a self-perpetuating growth industry? What role does politics play in developing theory? Theory explains how we think about an issue and ultimately how we deal with it. Studying reaction to crime reveals the reality constructed by various actors. This hybrid textbook and reader encourages students to reflect on the very complex nature of criminal justice, to analyze the theories that have informed various practices, and to recognize the intellectual underpinnings of each. The eight perspectives and the multiple readings that illustrate them provide the background for the reader to place criminal justice in context with other social controls. The ultimate purpose of the study of existing metaphors for criminal justice is to develop the skills to participate in future theorizing about a vital topic..
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