Attractive, middle-aged Emily Hughes appeared to have it all as the wife of a successful and handsome husband. Suddenly her husband asks for a divorce. Devastated by the divorce, wounded by the Catholic Church's annulment of her thirty-five year marriage and misunderstood by her adult daughters, Emily realizes that she, too, had been unfulfilled in the marriage. Emily has lost her spiritual compass and sets out on a journey to remap the rest of her life. What sets this novel apart from others in this genre is the spiritual nature of Emily's quest. Her faith is both challenged and enriched as she explores new friendships with a free-spirited neighbor and friend, Frances, who accompanies her to Nepal to trek through the Himalayas. On this trek she meets a young Buddhist Sherpa and Roman Catholic priest floundering in his priesthood and finally an enigmatic man who has just spent the past year in a Buddhist monastery. Emily's journey with the help of her new friends leads her to find new ways to get on with her life.
From Daisy Miller to Isabel Archer to Maisie, female characters dominate the work of Henry James and, often, critical discussion of James's work. Donatella Izzo shifts that discussion to a different, more revealing, plane in this original interpretation of James's short fiction. By redirecting criticism from a biographical emphasis to a focus on James's engagement with the issues of representation, Izzo shows how these short stories actually question and investigate the cultural and ideological practices that produced women, both in literature and in society.øPortraying the Lady brings to light the experimental quality and inherent consistency of stories that have received little critical attention, all of which revolve around ideas at the core of the cultural representation of femininity at the time. Izzo shows how James, by testing and stretching these ideas in his imagery and plots, exposed and exploded the perverse logic and the ultimate implications of such culturally shared versions of femininity, thus revealing their oppressive quality for women and laying bare literature's complicity in reproducing and circulating them. Exposing James's texts as sensitive registers of women's roles during the Victorian-Edwardian era, this book demonstrates that his texts make readers aware of how those stereotypes operated.øBlending literary, art, and feminist criticism with narratological analysis and postmodern theory, this groundbreaking work restores a formal awareness to James studies within the wider theoretical concerns of feminist, gender, and cultural critiques.
“One of the best Italian novels of the year” in a pitch-perfect rendering in English by Ann Goldstein, Elena Ferrante’s translator (Huffington Post, Italy). Winner of the Campiello Prize A 2019 Best Book of the Year (The Washington Post Kirkus Reviews Dallas Morning News) Told with an immediacy and a rare expressive intensity that has earned it countless adoring readers and one of Italy’s most prestigious literary prizes, A Girl Returned is a powerful novel rendered with sensitivity and verve by Ann Goldstein, translator of the works of Elena Ferrante. Set against the stark, beautiful landscape of Abruzzo in central Italy, this is a compelling story about mothers and daughters, about responsibility, siblings, and caregiving. Without warning or explanation, an unnamed thirteen-year-old girl is sent away from the family she has always thought of as hers to live with her birth family: a large, chaotic assortment of individuals whom she has never met and who seem anything but welcoming. Thus begins a new life, one of struggle, tension, and conflict, especially between the young girl and her mother. But in her relationship with Adriana and Vincenzo, two of her newly acquired siblings, she will find the strength to start again and to build a new and enduring sense of self. “An achingly beautiful book, and an utterly devastating one.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune “Di Pietrantonio [has a] lively way with a phrase (the translator, Ann Goldstein, shows the same sensitivity she does with Elena Ferrante) [and] a fine instinct for detail.” —The Washington Post “A gripping, deeply moving coming-of-age novel; immensely readable, beautifully written, and highly recommended.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Captivating.” —The Economist
Mobilizing for Democracy compares two waves of protests for democracy, in Central Eastern Europe in 1989 and in the Middle East and North Africa in 2011.
The ascendance of austerity policies and the protests they have generated have had a deep impact on the shape of contemporary politics. The stunning electoral successes of SYRIZA in Greece, Podemos in Spain and the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S) in Italy, alongside the quest for a more radical left in countries such as the UK and the US, bear witness to a new wave of parties that draws inspiration and strength from social movements. The rise of movement parties challenges simplistic expectations of a growing separation between institutional and contentious politics and the decline of the left. Their return demands attention as a way of understanding both contemporary socio-political dynamics and the fundamentals of political parties and representation. Bridging social movement and party politics studies, within a broad concern with democratic theories, this volume presents new empirical evidence and conceptual insight into these topical socio-political phenomena, within a cross-national comparative perspective.
Chawton House Library: Women's Travel Writings are multi-volume editions with full texts reproduced in facsimile with new scholarly apparatus. The texts have been carefully selected to illustrate various themes in women's history.
Where Did the Revolution Go? considers the apparent disappearance of the large social movements that have contributed to democratization. Revived by recent events of the Arab Spring, this question is once again paramount. Is the disappearance real, given the focus of mass media and scholarship on electoral processes and 'normal politics'? Does it always happen, or only under certain circumstances? Are those who struggled for change destined to be disappointed by the slow pace of transformation? Which mechanisms are activated and deactivated during the rise and fall of democratization? This volume addresses these questions through empirical analysis based on quantitative and qualitative methods (including oral history) of cases in two waves of democratization: Central Eastern European cases in 1989 as well as cases in the Middle East and Mediterranean region in 2011.
The birth of democracies owes much to the interventions and mobilizations of ordinary people. Yet many feel as though they have inherited democratic institutions which do not deliver for the people – that a rigid democratic process has been imposed from above, with increasing numbers of people feeling left out or left behind. In this well-researched volume, leading political sociologist Donatella della Porta rehabilitates the role social movements have long played in fostering and deepening democracy, particularly focusing on progressive movements of the Left which have sought to broaden the plurality of voices and knowledge in democratic debate. Bridging social movement studies and democratic theory, della Porta investigates contemporary innovations in times of crisis, particularly those in the direction of participatory and deliberative practices – ‘crowd-sourced constitutions’, referendums from below and movement parties – and reflects on the potential and limits of such alternative politics. In a moment in which concerns increase for the potential disruption of a Great Regression led by xenophobic movements and parties, the cases and analyses of resistance in this volume offer important material for students and scholars of political sociology, political science and social movement studies.
This is a scholarly study of Lady Morgan(Sydney Owenson)and her travel writings on post Napoleonic Italy. Morgan, a friend of Byron and Moore, brought a unique Anglo-Irish slant and liberal temperment to her travels and adventures in Italy; she also was the first woman from the British literary world to extensively travel and report on 19th c Italy.
More than a chronicle, America in the Round is a critical history that reveals how far Washington D.C.'s Arena Stage could go with its budget and racially liberal politics, and how Arena both disputed and duplicated systems of power. With an innovative "in the round" approach, the narrative simulates sitting in different parts of the arena space to see the theatre through different lenses--economics, racial dynamics, and American identity.
This book provides an accessible introduction and practical guidelines to apply asymmetric multidimensional scaling, cluster analysis, and related methods to asymmetric one-mode two-way and three-way asymmetric data. A major objective of this book is to present to applied researchers a set of methods and algorithms for graphical representation and clustering of asymmetric relationships. Data frequently concern measurements of asymmetric relationships between pairs of objects from a given set (e.g., subjects, variables, attributes,...), collected in one or more matrices. Examples abound in many different fields such as psychology, sociology, marketing research, and linguistics and more recently several applications have appeared in technological areas including cybernetics, air traffic control, robotics, and network analysis. The capabilities of the presented algorithms are illustrated by carefully chosen examples and supported by extensive data analyses. A review of the specialized statistical software available for the applications is also provided. This monograph is highly recommended to readers who need a complete and up-to-date reference on methods for asymmetric proximity data analysis.
CBT as an Integrative Psychotherapy explores the current key themes, approaches, and interventions in psychotherapy. Developed and based on a dialogue between trainee psychotherapists, colleagues, collaborators, and scholars, this book integrates theoretical and technical aspects of psychological interventions. Chapters link theory and practice and provide philosophical insights in an accessible and discursive manner. The authors conduct a thoughtful analysis of psychotherapy and cover several topics including conflict, acceptance, self-esteem, and pseudo psychology. This book is discursive in nature and essential reading for novice and more experienced therapists. The integrative approach used throughout will allow trainees and practitioners to discover a coherent theoretical and practical framework for helping a diverse range of clients.
Recent years have seen an enormous increase in protests across the world in which citizens have challenged what they see as a deterioration of democratic institutions and the very civil, political and social rights that form the basis of democratic life. Beginning with Iceland in 2008, and then forcefully in Egypt, Tunisia, Spain, Greece and Portugal, or more recently in Peru, Brazil, Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Ukraine, people have taken to the streets against what they perceive as a rampant and dangerous corruption of democracy, with a distinct focus on inequality and suffering. This timely new book addresses the anti-austerity social movements of which these protests form part, mobilizing in the context of a crisis of neoliberalism. Donatella della Porta shows that, in order to understand their main facets in terms of social basis, strategy, and identity and organizational structures, we should look at the specific characteristics of the socioeconomic, cultural and political context in which they developed. The result is an important and insightful contribution to understanding a key issue of our times, which will be of interest to students and scholars of political and economic sociology, political science and social movement studies, as well as political activists.
Among the violent acts perpetrated by radical Islamist groups in Europe, the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris has been one of those that has arguably challenged established categories of public debate the most. Through a multifaceted and detailed analysis of the public discourse around the Charlie Hebdo episode in France, Germany, Italy, and the UK, Discursive Turns and Critical Junctures offers an in-depth analysis of how political groups and religious organizations have reacted to the event, which claims they have made in the public sphere, and how they have justified such claims. Drawing on newspaper sources and discourse analysis, the authors navigate the complexities caused by political violence. They develop a threefold comparison that considers how the debate differs across countries; how it evolved over time; and how it varies when one looks at mainstream media compared to social movement arenas. Based on a triangulation of quantitative and qualitative analyses, the book pays particular attention to radical left, radical right and religious actors and to issues related to migration and integration, secularism and cultural diversity, security and civil rights. In particular, they focus on the way in which transformative events act as critical junctures within different public spheres. Starting from the nefarious attacks on January 2015, this theoretically compelling and methodologically sophisticated study of public debates in Europe adds substantially to the growing body of research into critical junctures and gives insights into into a number of debates.
Network funding forms part of the Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture, which aims to enhance cultural and artistic collaboration in the Nordic and Baltic countries by funding travel, networking, and residential activities. Network funding provides a platform for co-operation and thus the exchange of ideas and knowledge between professional artists and cultural practitioners in the Nordic and Baltic regions. This study on the effects of Network funding was commissioned by Nordic Culture Point in the spring of 2018 in order to gain insight into the long-term effects of funding and to examine its results for professional artists and cultural practitioners in the Nordic and Baltic countries. Data for the analysis was obtained through both qualitative and quantitative methods. The results show that networking is beneficial not only for its own sake, but also for the professional development of the recipients and the entire artistic or cultural field that they represent. Network funding is perceived as valuable amongst professional artists and cultural practitioners.
Chawton House Library: Women's Travel Writings are multi-volume editions with full texts reproduced in facsimile with new scholarly apparatus. The texts have been carefully selected to illustrate various themes in women's history.
Social Movements is a comprehensive introduction andcritical analysis of collective action in society today. In thisnew edition, the authors have updated all chapters with the mostrecent scientific literature, expanded on topics such as individualmotivations, new media, public policies, and governance. Draws on research and empirical work across the social sciencesto address the key questions in this international field. New edition expands on topics such as individual motivations,new media, public policies, and governance. Has been redesigned in a more user-friendly format.
This book analyses protests against the Great Recession in the European periphery. While social movements have long been considered as children of affluent times - or at least of times of opening opportunities - these protests defy such expectations, developing instead in moments of diminishing opportunities in both the economic and the political realms. Can social movement studies still be useful to understanding these movements of troubled times? The authors offer a positive answer to this question, although specify the need to bridge contentious politics with other fields, including political economy. They highlight differences in the social movements’ strength and breadth and attempt to understand them in terms of three sets of dimensions: a) the specific characteristics of the socio-economic crisis and its consequences in terms of mobilization potential; b) the political reactions to it, in what we can define as political opportunities and threats; and c) the social movement cultures and structures that characterize each country. The book discusses these topics through a contextualized analysis of anti-austerity protest in the European periphery.
Chawton House Library: Women's Travel Writings are multi-volume editions with full texts reproduced in facsimile with new scholarly apparatus. The texts have been carefully selected to illustrate various themes in women's history.
Clandestine Political Violence compares four types of clandestine political violence: left-wing (in Italy and Germany), right-wing (in Italy), ethnonationalist (in Spain) and religious fundamentalist (in Islamist clandestine organizations). Oriented toward theory building, Della Porta develops her own definition of clandestine political violence. Building on the most recent developments in social movement studies, Della Porta proposes an original interpretative model. Using a unique research design, she singles out some common causal mechanisms at the onset, during the persistence and at the demise of clandestine political violence. The development of the phenomenon is located within the interactions among social movements, countermovements and the state. She pays particular attention to the ways different actors cognitively construct the reality they act upon. Based on original empirical research as well as existing research in many languages, this book is rich in empirical evidence on some of the most crucial cases of clandestine political violence.
Chawton House Library: Women's Travel Writings are multi-volume editions with full texts reproduced in facsimile with new scholarly apparatus. The texts have been carefully selected to illustrate various themes in women's history.
From Daisy Miller to Isabel Archer to Maisie, female characters dominate the work of Henry James and, often, critical discussion of James's work. Donatella Izzo shifts that discussion to a different, more revealing, plane in this original interpretation of James's short fiction. By redirecting criticism from a biographical emphasis to a focus on James's engagement with the issues of representation, Izzo shows how these short stories actually question and investigate the cultural and ideological practices that produced women, both in literature and in society.øPortraying the Lady brings to light the experimental quality and inherent consistency of stories that have received little critical attention, all of which revolve around ideas at the core of the cultural representation of femininity at the time. Izzo shows how James, by testing and stretching these ideas in his imagery and plots, exposed and exploded the perverse logic and the ultimate implications of such culturally shared versions of femininity, thus revealing their oppressive quality for women and laying bare literature's complicity in reproducing and circulating them. Exposing James's texts as sensitive registers of women's roles during the Victorian-Edwardian era, this book demonstrates that his texts make readers aware of how those stereotypes operated.øBlending literary, art, and feminist criticism with narratological analysis and postmodern theory, this groundbreaking work restores a formal awareness to James studies within the wider theoretical concerns of feminist, gender, and cultural critiques.
In recent years, social movements on the left have increasingly begun to make themselves felt in referendums. This has been seen throughout Europe: in votes regarding independence in Scotland and Catalonia, on water rights in Italy, on debt repayment in Iceland, and on the financial proposals of the troika in Greece. This book presents case studies of those referendums and more to analyze the ways that social movements formed in the wake of the 2008 crash have affected referendums' development and outcomes. Looking at general issues of democracy, as well as the political effects of neoliberalism, this book is ideally suited to help us understand some of the issues around Brexit and will be read by a wide audience interested in social movements, referendums, and democratic innovation.
Philosophers have long struggled to reconcile Martin Heidegger's involvement in Nazism with his status as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. The recent publication of his Black Notebooks has reignited fierce debate on the subject. These thousand-odd pages of jotted observations profoundly challenge our image of the quiet philosopher's exile in the Black Forest, revealing the shocking extent of his anti-Semitism for the first time. For much of the philosophical community, the Black Notebooks have been either used to discredit Heidegger or seen as a bibliographical detail irrelevant to his thought. Yet, in this new book, renowned philosopher Donatella Di Cesare argues that Heidegger's "metaphysical anti-Semitism" was a central part of his philosophical project. Within the context of the Nuremberg race laws, Heidegger felt compelled to define Jewishness and its relationship to his concept of Being. Di Cesare shows that Heidegger saw the Jews as the agents of a modernity that had disfigured the spirit of the West. In a deeply disturbing extrapolation, he presented the Holocaust as both a means for the purification of Being and the Jews' own "self-destruction": a process of death on an industrialized scale that was the logical conclusion of the acceleration in technology they themselves had brought about. Situating Heidegger's anti-Semitism firmly within the context of his thought, this groundbreaking work will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and history as well as the many readers interested in Heidegger's life, work, and legacy.
European leaders faced the Covid-19 pandemic by adopting very different leadership styles, characterized by diverging approaches to crisis communication, power management, and relationship-building with actors and stakeholders in the public sphere. The pandemic also highlighted the importance of the already-existing cleavage between populism and technocracy, positioning it at the centre of the political scene. These complex circumstances required a multidisciplinary perspective grounded in political sociology and communication studies. To address these issues, this book analyses the communication and leadership styles of seven European leaders, grouped into ‘political families’. It analyses the cases of Angela Merkel and Erna Solberg to understand if and how female leaderships differentiated from their male counterparts. It then analyses the relationship between techno-populism and professional politics by comparing the cases of Giuseppe Conte, Emmanuel Macron and Pedro Sanchez. Finally, it focuses on populist leaders Boris Johnson and Victor Orbán, who represent emblematic cases with opposite outcomes.
Protest campaigns against large-scale public works usually take place within a local context. However, since the 1990s new forms of protest have been emerging. This book analyses two cases from Italy that illustrate this development: the environmentalist protest campaigns against the TAV (the building of a new high-speed railway in Val de Susa, close to the border with France), and the construction of the Bridge on the Messina Straits (between Calabria and Sicily). Such mobilizations emerge from local conflicts but develop as part of a global justice movement, often resulting in the production of new identities. They are promoted through multiple networks of different social and political groups, that share common claims and adopt various forms of protest action. It is during the protest campaigns that a sense of community is created.
Drawing interview material, together with extensive data from the authors’ original social movement database, this book examines the development of social movements in resistance to perceived political "regression" and a growing right-wing backlash. With a focus on Italy and the reaction to increasing inequalities and welfare state retrenchment policies, it examines opposition to the government and state authorities on a number of issues. Triangulating different types of data, it sheds light on the ability of citizens to organise in the streets and addresses crucial matters in social movement research, including the significance to political mobilization of grievances, class, gender and generational differences, as well as considering the network dynamics of micro-mobilization, visions of Europe, and the role of interactions with major political institutions. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology and politics with interests in social movements and political mobilization.
Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), one of the towering figures of contemporary Continental philosophy, is best known for Truth and Method, where he elaborated the concept of "philosophical hermeneutics," a programmatic way to get to what we do when we engage in interpretation. Donatella Di Cesare highlights the central place of Greek philosophy, particularly Plato, in Gadamer's work, brings out differences between his thought and that of Heidegger, and connects him with discussions and debates in pragmatism. This is a sensitive and thoroughly readable philosophical portrait of one of the 20th century's most powerful thinkers.
Italian neo-realism has inspired film audiences and fascinated critics and film scholars for decades. This book offers an original analysis of the movement and its defining films from the perspective of the cultural unconscious. Combining a Jungian reading with traditional theorizations of film and national identity, Filming the Nation reinterprets familiar images of well-known masterpieces by Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica and Luchino Visconti and introduces some of their less renowned yet equally significant films. Providing an illuminating analysis of film images across a particularly traumatic and complex historical period, Filming the Nation revisits the concept of national identity and its ‘construction’ from a perspective that combines cultural, psychoanalytic and post-Jungian theories. As such this book will be essential reading for all students and scholars of film and psychoanalysis.
This book investigates the origins of civil wars which emerge from failed attempts at democratization. The main aim of this volume is to develop a theoretical explanation of the conditions under which and the mechanisms through which social movements’ struggles for democracy end up in civil war. While the empirical evidence suggests that this is not a rare phenomenon, the literatures on social movements, democratization and civil wars have grown apart from each other. At the theoretical level, Social Movements and Civil War bridges insights in the three fields, looking in particular at explanations of the radicalization of social movements, the failure of democratization processes and the onset of civil war. In doing this, it builds upon the relational approach developed in contentious politics with the aim of singling out robust causal mechanisms. At the empirical level, the research provides in-depth descriptions of four cases of trajectory from social movements for democratization into civil wars: in Syria, Libya, Yemen and the former Yugoslavia. Conditions such as the double weakness of civil society and the state, the presence of entrepreneurs of violence as well as normative and material resources for violence, ethnic and tribal divisions, domestic and international military interventions are considered as influencing the chains of actors’ choices rather than as structural determinants. This book will be of great interest to students of civil wars, political violence, social movements, democratization, and IR in general.
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