Exceptional States examines new configurations of marriage, immigration, and sovereignty emerging in an increasingly mobile Asia where Cold War legacies continue to shape contemporary political struggles over sovereignty and citizenship. Focused on marital immigration from China to Taiwan, the book documents the struggles of these women and men as they seek acceptance and recognition in their new home. Through tracing parallels between the predicaments of Chinese marital immigrants and the uncertain future of the Taiwan nation-state, the book shows how intimate attachments and emotional investments infuse the governmental practices of Taiwanese bureaucrats charged with regulating immigration and producing citizenship and sovereignty. Its attention to a group of immigrants whose exceptional status has become necessary to Taiwan’s national integrity exposes the social, political, and subjective consequences of life on the margins of citizenship and sovereignty.
Exceptional States examines new configurations of marriage, immigration, and sovereignty emerging in an increasingly mobile Asia where Cold War legacies continue to shape contemporary political struggles over sovereignty and citizenship. Focused on marital immigration from China to Taiwan, the book documents the struggles of these women and men as they seek acceptance and recognition in their new home. Through tracing parallels between the predicaments of Chinese marital immigrants and the uncertain future of the Taiwan nation-state, the book shows how intimate attachments and emotional investments infuse the governmental practices of Taiwanese bureaucrats charged with regulating immigration and producing citizenship and sovereignty. Its attention to a group of immigrants whose exceptional status has become necessary to Taiwan’s national integrity exposes the social, political, and subjective consequences of life on the margins of citizenship and sovereignty.
Migrant Encounters examines what happens when migrants across Asia encounter the restrictions and opportunities presented by state actors and policies. Contributions draw on original ethnographic work foregrounding migrants' intimate lives to argue that such encounters unpredictably transform migrants and the states between which they move.
On a visit to eastern Hui’an in 1994, Sara Friedman was surprised to see a married woman reluctant to visit her conjugal home. The author would soon learn that this practice was typical of the area, along with distinctive female dress styles, gender divisions of labor, and powerful same-sex networks. These customs, she would learn, have long distinguished villages in this coastal region of southeastern China from other rural Han communities. Intimate Politics explores these practices that have constituted eastern Hui’an residents, women in particular, as an anomaly among rural Han. This book asks what such practices have come to mean in a post-1949 socialist order that has incorporated forms of marriage, labor, and dress into a developmental scale extending from the primitive to the civilized. Government reform campaigns were part of a wholesale effort to remake Chinese society by replacing its “feudal” elements with liberated socialist ideals and practices. As state actors became involved in the intimate aspects of Huidong women’s lives, their official models of progress were challenged by the diversity of local practices and commitment of local residents. These politicized entanglements have generated what the author calls “intimate politics,” a form of embodied struggle in which socialist civilizing agendas—from the state-sponsored reforms of the Maoist decades to the market-based “reform and opening” of the post-Mao era—have been formulated, contested, and, in some cases, transformed through the bodies and practices of local women.
Transplantation Gothic is a shadow cultural history of transplantation, as mediated through medical writing, science fiction, life writing and visual arts in a Gothic mode, from the nineteenth-century to the present. The works explore the experience of donor/suppliers, recipients and practitioners, and simultaneously express transfer-related suffering and are complicit in its erasure. Examining texts from Europe, North America and India, the book resists exoticising predatorial tissue economies and considers fantasies of harvest as both product and symbol of structural ruination under neoliberal capitalism. In their efforts to articulate bioengineered hybridity, these works are not only anxious but speculative. The book will be of interest to academics and students researching Gothic studies, science fiction, critical medical humanities and cultural studies of transplantation.
This book analyzes U.S. foreign policy in relation to human rights and democratic development abroad. Its purpose is to determine if, and how, human rights policies, or their neglect, have led to Realpolitik successes for the United States. In addition, it addresses the issue of how Washington might best respond to challenges in which a choice apparently must be made between support for democracy and preservation of U.S. national interests. Through a comparative analysis of Iran under the Shah, Nicaragua under the Somozas, and the Philippines under Marcos, Steinmetz evaluates the effectiveness of American priorities in authoritarian states that were perceived to protect U.S. interests. Rejecting the policy prescriptions of the neoconservative and neorealist schools, she concludes that protection of human rights abroad is desirable, not because of its moral implications per se, but because of its positive contributions to the preservation of U.S. national interests.
An illustrated A to Z reference containing over 800 entries providing information on the theology, people, historical events, institutions and movements related to the religion of Judaism.
Modern statistics deals with large and complex data sets, and consequently with models containing a large number of parameters. This book presents a detailed account of recently developed approaches, including the Lasso and versions of it for various models, boosting methods, undirected graphical modeling, and procedures controlling false positive selections. A special characteristic of the book is that it contains comprehensive mathematical theory on high-dimensional statistics combined with methodology, algorithms and illustrations with real data examples. This in-depth approach highlights the methods’ great potential and practical applicability in a variety of settings. As such, it is a valuable resource for researchers, graduate students and experts in statistics, applied mathematics and computer science.
This textbook provides the reader with an essential understanding of computational methods for intelligent systems. These are defined as systems that can solve problems autonomously, in particular problems where algorithmic solutions are inconceivable for humans or not practically executable by computers. Despite the rapidly growing applications in this field, the book avoids application details, instead focusing on computational methods that equip the reader with the methodological tools and competencies necessary to tackle current and future complex applications. The book consists of two parts: computational intelligence methods for optimization, and machine learning. Part I begins with the concept of optimization, and introduces local search algorithms, genetic algorithms, and particle swarm optimization. Part II begins with an introduction to machine learning and covers several methods, many of which can be used as supervised learning algorithms, such as decision tree learning, artificial neural networks, genetic programming, Bayesian learning, support vector machines, and ensemble methods, plus a discussion of unsupervised learning. This textbook is written in a self-contained style, suitable for undergraduate or graduate students in computer science and engineering, and for self-study by researchers and practitioners.
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