Now showing items 1-20 of 41

    • Technical Communication for Environmental Action

      Williams, Sean D. (SUNY Press, 2023-01-01)
      Climate change is one of the most significant challenges facing the global community in the twenty-first century. With its position at the border of people, technology, science, and communication, technical communication has a significant role to play in helping to solve these complex environmental problems. This collection of essays engages scholars and practitioners in a conversation about how the field has contributed to pragmatic and democratic action to address climate change. Compared to most prior work—which offers theoretical perspectives of environmental communication—this collection explores the actual practice of international technical communicators who participate in government projects, corporate processes, nonprofit programs, and international agency work, demonstrating how technical communication theories such as participatory design, social justice, and ethics can help shape pragmatic environmental action.
    • Envisioning Sociology

      Scott, John; Bromley, Ray (SUNY Press, 2013-06-01)
      Envisioning Sociology is a landmark work, the first major study of the founding of sociology in Britain and the enormous contributions made by the intellectual circle led by Victor Branford and Patrick Geddes. Authors John Scott and Ray Bromley chronicle the biographical connections and personal partnerships of the circle's key participants, their international connections, their organization-building work, and the business activities that underpinned their efforts. Branford and Geddes fashioned an ambitious and wide-ranging interdisciplinary vision, drawing on geography, anthropology, economics, and urban planning, in addition to sociology. This vision was an integral part of a project of social reconstruction, a "third way" eschewing both liberalism and communism in favor of cooperation, redistribution, and federalism. Envisioning Sociology uncovers a previously hidden history of the social sciences, giving readers a fascinating glimpse into early twentieth-century social science and political economy, while demonstrating the contemporary relevance of the ideas of these underrated figures. Although Branford and Geddes failed to establish the grand sociology they envisioned, their ideas helped develop the theory and practice of community development, participatory democracy, bioregionalism, historic preservation, and neighborhood upgrading.
    • Native American Nationalism and Nation Re-building

      Poliandri, Simone (SUNY Press, 2016-05-01)
      Bringing together perspectives from a variety of disciplines, this book provides an interdisciplinary approach to the emerging discussion on Indigenous nationhood. The contributors argue for the centrality of nationhood and nation building in molding and, concurrently, blending the political, social, economic, and cultural strategies toward Native American self-definitions and self-determination. Included among the common themes is the significance of space—conceived both as traditional territory and colonial reservation—in the current construction of Native national identity. Whether related to historical memory and the narrativization of peoplehood, the temporality of indigenous claims to sovereignty, or the demarcation of successful financial assets as cultural and social emblems of indigenous space, territory constitutes an inalienable and necessary element connecting Native American peoplehood and nationhood. The creation and maintenance of Native American national identity have also overcome structural territorial impediments and may benefit from the inclusivity of citizenship rather than the exclusivity of ethnicity. In all cases, the political effectiveness of nationhood in promoting and sustaining sovereignty presupposes Native full participation in and control over economic development, the formation of historical narrative and memory, the definition of legality, and governance.
    • Everyday Sustainability

      Sen, Debarati (SUNY Press, 2017-11-01)
      Everyday Sustainability takes readers to ground zero of market-based sustainability initiatives—Darjeeling, India—where Fair Trade ostensibly promises gender justice to minority Nepali women engaged in organic tea production. These women tea farmers and plantation workers have distinct entrepreneurial strategies and everyday practices of social justice that at times dovetail with and at other times rub against the tenets of the emerging global morality market. The author questions why women beneficiaries of transnational justice-making projects remain skeptical about the potential for economic and social empowerment through Fair Trade while simultaneously seeking to use the movement to give voice to their situated demands for mobility, economic advancement, and community level social justice.
    • Creating Sustainable Communities

      Scarce, Rik (SUNY Press, 2015-06-01)
      From Mount Marcy to Manhattan and beyond, the Hudson River region has become an incubator for rich and varied experiments in sustainable living. In this fascinating book, Rik Scarce showcases some of these efforts by telling the stories of dynamic individuals and organizations that are remaking the region's landscape through ecosystem stewardship, nurturing agricultural practices, and urban renewal for the twenty-first century, along with those promoting creative land-use planning, richly functioning communities, and green businesses. Together, their achievements point to the potential for other areas of the country to forge sustainable futures, and also remind us of the sobering realities and daunting challenges that await us as we attempt to remake our relationships with the planet and with each other.
    • Adventures in Sustainable Urbanism

      Krueger, Robert; Freytag, Tim; Mössner, Samuel (SUNY Press, 2019-11-01)
      In the context of urban sustainable development, the "details" of sustainability's current expressions perpetuate environmental injustice, untenable growth, and the destruction of functioning ecosystems. In response to this state of affairs, Adventures in Sustainable Urbanism aims to prompt new debates about the consequences of sustainable urbanism as it moves from planning to practice. Contributors explore policy, practice, and experience from cities around the world, including Calgary, Christchurch, Dortmund, Vancouver, and others. Written by scholars who live in these cities, chapters offer empirically rich descriptions for opening up new lines of thinking, theorizing, and debate about the sustainable city and its actual material expressions in place. By examining the sustainable city through various analytical framings, contributors urge readers to move from viewing the sustainable city as something everyone can agree on, to a highly politicized and contested process. Additional resources are provided for readers who may wish to extend their own research into a city or theme.
    • The Arab Revolution of 2011

      Arjomand, Saïd Amir (SUNY Press, 2015-04-01)
      How do we make sense of the Arab revolution of 2011? What were its successes, its failures, and significance in world history? The Arab Revolution of 2011 brings together a broad range of perspectives to explain the causes, processes, and consequences of the revolution of 2011 and its critical implications for the future. The contributors, in this major addition to the sociology of revolutions, step back from the earlier euphoria of the Arab Spring to provide a sober analysis of what is still an ongoing process of upheaval in the Middle East. The essays address the role of national armies and foreign military intervention, the character and structure of old regimes as determinants of peaceful or violent political transformation, the constitutional placement of Islam in post-revolutionary regimes, and the possibilities of supplanting authoritarianism with democracy. The revolution of 2011 is also examined within a broad historical perspective, comparing the dynamics of revolution and counterrevolution in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya with such epochal events as the European revolution of 1848 and Russia in 1917.
    • International Librarianship

      Constantinou, Constantia; Miller, Michael J.; Schlesinger, Kenneth (SUNY Press, 2017-02-01)
      International librarianship stems from a desire to bring about political change, transcultural understanding, collaboration, and mutual respect. Historically, librarians have been deeply involved with challenging issues of information sharing, equity in information access, and bridging the digital divide between different socioeconomic communities. This collection draws on case studies from American librarians who traveled to Central America, the Caribbean, Central Europe, Africa, the Mediterranean, and Asia to participate in librarian-initiated and sponsored projects. They united communities, promoted religious and cultural tolerance, developed new facilities, or enhanced existing libraries and archives, thereby enriching communities with resources, professional expertise, new partnerships, and sustainable development practices. International Librarianship offers insight into how these experiences might serve as templates and promote best practices in collaborations within the library profession in the United States and abroad, and it also demonstrates how international experiences can enliven home institutions upon return.
    • Louise Blanchard Bethune

      McAlonie, Kelly Hayes (SUNY Press, 2023-03-01)
      As America's first professional female architect, Louise Blanchard Bethune broke barriers in a male-dominated profession that was emerging as a vital force in a rapidly growing nation during the Gilded Age. Yet, Bethune herself is an enigma. Due to scant information about her life and her firm, Bethune, Bethune & Fuchs, scholars have struggled to provide a complete picture of this trailblazer. Using a newly discovered archival source of photographs, architectural drawings, and personal documents, Kelly Hayes McAlonie paints a picture of Bethune never before seen. Born in 1856 in Waterloo and raised in Buffalo, New York, Bethune wanted to be an architect from childhood. In fulfilling her dream, she challenged the nation to reconsider what a woman could do. A bicycle-riding advocate for coeducation, Bethune believed in women's emancipation through equal pay for equal work. This belief would be tested during the design competition for the Woman's Building for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, where female entrants were not paid for their work. Bethune refused to participate on principle, but nonetheless her career thrived, culminating in the most important commission of her life, Buffalo's Hotel Lafayette. A comprehensive biography of the first professional woman architect in the United States, who was also the first woman to be admitted to the American Institute of Architects, this book serves as an important addition to New York and architectural history.
    • Introduction to LGBTQ+ Studies

      Amory, Deborah; Massey, Sean; Miller, Jennifer; Brown, Allison (State University of New York Press, 2022-11-01)
      Introduction to LGBTQ+ Studies offers accessible, academically sound information on a wide range of topics, including history, culture, and Queer Theory; an exploration of LGBTQ+ relationships, families, parenting, health, and education; and how to conduct research on LGBTQ+ topics. The book explores LGBTQ+ issues from the ancient world to contemporary global perspectives. Employing an intersectional analysis, the textbook highlights how sexuality and gender are simultaneously experienced and constructed through other structures of inequality and privilege, such as race and class. The text supports multiple learning styles by integrating visual elements, multimedia resources, discussion and project prompts, and resources for further research throughout the textbook. An OER version of this course is freely available thanks to the generous support of SUNY OER Services. Access the book online at https://milneopentextbooks.org/introduction-to-lgbtq-studies-a-cross-disciplinary-approach/.
    • Moving across Differences

      Blackburn, Mollie V. (SUNY Press, 2022-09-01)
      Grounded in ethnography and teacher research, Moving across Differences examines how an LGBTQ+-themed literature course enabled high school students to negotiate their differences and engage in ethical encounters. Drawing on the work of queer theorists, Mollie V. Blackburn conceptualizes these encounters as forms of movement across differences of not only gender and sexuality but also identity and ideology more broadly. As we follow Blackburn's thoughtful rendering of students' sometimes fraught exchanges, we are encouraged to follow their lead and move when confronted with differences. We might move closer to those like us, so we can be in community to recover and heal. But we might also move closer to others, so we can discover and learn. The book argues, though, that we must move ethically and, moreover, that literature and the work of reading, writing, and talking can foster this movement. Modeling care in both teaching and research, Moving across Differences contributes to the study and practice of English Language Arts curriculum and pedagogy, qualitative methods, and queer theory.
    • Storytelling

      Gasché, Rodolphe (SUNY Press, 2018-10-01)
      In Storytelling, Rodolphe Gasché reexamines the muteness of Holocaust survivors, that is, their inability to tell their stories. This phenomenon has not been explained up to now without reducing the violence of the events to which survivors were subjected, on the one hand, and diminishing the specific harm that has been done to them as human beings, on the other. Distinguishing storytelling from testifying and providing information, Gasché asserts that the utter senselessness of the violence inflicted upon them is what inhibited survivors from making sense of their experience in the form of tellable stories. In a series of readings of major theories of storytelling by three thinkers—Wilhelm Schapp, whose work will be a welcome discovery to many English-speaking audiences, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt—Gasché systematically assesses the consequences of the loss of the storytelling faculty, considered by some an inalienable possession of the human, both for the victims' humanity and for philosophy.
    • Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future

      Garrido Castellano, Carlos (SUNY Press, 2021-10-01)
      Analyzing the confluence between coloniality and activist art, Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future argues that there is much to gain from approaching contemporary politically committed art practices from the angle of anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial struggles. These struggles inspired a vast yet underexplored set of ideas about art and cultural practices and did so decades before the acceptance of radical artistic practices by mainstream art institutions. Carlos Garrido Castellano argues that art activism has been confined to a limited spatial and temporal framework—that of Western culture and the modernist avant-garde. Assumptions about the individual creator and the belated arrival of derivative avant-garde aesthetics to the periphery have generated a narrow view of “political art” at the expense of our capacity to perceive a truly global alternative praxis. Garrido Castellano then illuminates such a praxis, focusing attention on socially engaged art from the Global South, challenging the supposed universality of Western artistic norms, and demonstrating the role of art in promoting and configuring a collective critical consciousness in postcolonial public spheres.
    • The White Indians of Mexican Cinema

      García Blizzard, Mónica (SUNY Press, 2022-04-01)
      The White Indians of Mexican Cinema theorizes the development of a unique form of racial masquerade—the representation of Whiteness as Indigeneity—during the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, from the 1930s to the 1950s. Adopting a broad decolonial perspective while remaining grounded in the history of local racial categories, Mónica García Blizzard argues that this trope works to reconcile two divergent discourses about race in postrevolutionary Mexico: the government-sponsored celebration of Indigeneity and mestizaje (or the process of interracial and intercultural mixing), on the one hand, and the idealization of Whiteness, on the other. Close readings of twenty films and primary source material illustrate how Mexican cinema has mediated race, especially in relation to gender, in ways that project national specificity, but also reproduce racist tendencies with respect to beauty, desire, and protagonism that survive to this day. This sweeping survey illuminates how Golden Age films produced diverse, even contradictory messages about the place of Indigeneity in the national culture.
    • Reconciliation in Global Context

      Krondorfer, Björn (SUNY Press, 2018-11-01)
      When we open the newspaper, watch and listen to the news, or follow social media, we are inundated with reports on old and fresh conflict zones around the world. Less apparent, perhaps, are the many attempts at bringing former adversaries together. Reconciliation in Global Context argues for the merit of reconciliation and for the need of global conversations around this topic. The contributing scholars and scholar-practitioners—who hail from the United States, South Africa, Ireland, Israel, Zimbabwe, Germany, Palestine, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Switzerland, and the Netherlands—describe and analyze examples of reconciliatory practices in different national and political environments. Drawing on direct experiences with reconciliation efforts, from facilitating psychosocial intergroup workshops to critically evaluating official policies, they also reflect on the personal motivations that guide them in this field of engagement. Arranged along an arc that spans from cases describing and interpreting actual processes with groups in conflict to cases in which the conceptual merits and constraints of reconciliation are brought to the fore, the chapters ask hard questions, but also argue for a relational approach to reconciliatory practices. For, in the end, what is important is to embrace a spirit of reconciliation that avoids self-interested action and, instead, advances other-directed care.
    • On Self-Translation

      Stavans, Ilan (SUNY Press, 2018-11-01)
      Finalist for the 2018 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards in the Essay category From award-winning, internationally known scholar and translator Ilan Stavans comes On Self-Translation, a collection of essays and conversations on language in its multifaceted forms. Stavans discusses the way syntax is being restructured by texting and other technologies. He examines how the alphabet itself is being forgotten by the young, how finger snapping has taken on a new meaning, how the use of ellipses has lapsed, and how autocorrect is shaping the way we communicate. In an incisive meditation, he shows how translating one's own work reinvents oneself in another tongue. The volume includes tête-à-têtes with Pulitzer Prize–winner Richard Wilbur and short-fiction master Lydia Davis, as well as dialogues on silence, multilingualism, poetry, and the durability of the classics. Stavans's explorations cover Spanish, English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and the hybrid lexicon of Spanglish. He muses on the meaning of foreignness and on living and dying in different languages. Among his primary concerns are the role and history of dictionaries and the extent to which the authority of language academies is less a reality than a delusion. He concludes with renditions into Spanglish of portions of Hamlet, Don Quixote, and The Little Prince. The wide range of themes and engaging yet informed style confirm Stavans's status, in the words of the Washington Post, as "Latin America's liveliest and boldest critic and most innovative cultural enthusiast."
    • Fire and Snow

      DiPaolo, Marc (SUNY Press, 2018-08-01)
      Fellow Inklings J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis may have belonged to different branches of Christianity, but they both made use of a faith-based environmentalist ethic to counter the mid-twentieth-century's triple threats of fascism, utilitarianism, and industrial capitalism. In Fire and Snow, Marc DiPaolo explores how the apocalyptic fantasy tropes and Christian environmental ethics of the Middle-earth and Narnia sagas have been adapted by a variety of recent writers and filmmakers of "climate fiction," a growing literary and cinematic genre that grapples with the real-world concerns of climate change, endless wars, and fascism, as well as the role religion plays in easing or escalating these apocalyptic-level crises. Among the many other well-known climate fiction narratives examined in these pages are Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, The Handmaid's Tale, Mad Max, and Doctor Who. Although the authors of these works stake out ideological territory that differs from Tolkien's and Lewis's, DiPaolo argues that they nevertheless mirror their predecessors' ecological concerns. The Christians, Jews, atheists, and agnostics who penned these works agree that we all need to put aside our cultural differences and transcend our personal, socioeconomic circumstances to work together to save the environment. Taken together, these works of climate fiction model various ways in which a deep ecological solidarity might be achieved across a broad ideological and cultural spectrum.
    • Race and Rurality in the Global Economy

      Crichlow, Michaeline A.; Northover, Patricia; Giusti-Cordero, Juan (SUNY Press, 2018-10-01)
      Issues of migration, environment, rurality, and the visceral "politics of place" and "space" have occupied center stage in recent electoral political struggles in the United States and Europe, suffused by an antiglobalization discourse that has come to resonate with Euro-American peoples. Race and Rurality in the Global Economy suggests that this present fractious global politics begs for closer attention to be paid to the deep-rooted conditions and outcomes of globalization and development. From multiple viewpoints the contributors to this volume propose ways of understanding the ongoing processes of globalization that configure peoples and places via a politics of rurality in a capitalist world economy, and through an optics of raciality that intersects with class, gender, identity, land, and environment. In tackling the dynamics of space and place, their essays address matters such as the heightened risks and multiple states of insecurity in the global economy; the new logics of expulsion and primitive accumulation dynamics shaping a new "savage sorting"; patterns of resistance and transformation in the face of globalization's political and environmental changes; the steady decline in the livelihoods of people of color globally and their deepened vulnerabilities; and the complex reconstitution of systemic and lived racialization within these processes. This book is an invitation to ask whether our dystopia in present politics can be disentangled from the deepening sense of "white fragility" in the context of the historical power of globalization's raced effects.
    • Just War and Human Rights

      Burkhardt, Todd (SUNY Press, 2017-03-01)
      Warfare in the twenty-first century presents significant challenges to the modern state. Serious questions have arisen about the use of drones, target selection, civilian exposure to harm, intervening for humanitarian reasons, and war as a means of forcing regime change. In Just War and Human Rights Todd Burkhardt argues that updating the laws of war and reforming just war theory is needed. A twenty-year veteran of the US Army, Burkhardt claims that war is impermissible unless it is engaged, fought, and concluded with right intention. A state must not only have a just cause and limit its war-making activity in order to vindicate the just cause, but it must also seek to vindicate its just cause in a way that yields a just and lasting peace. A just and lasting peace is motivated by the just war tenet of right intention and predicated on the realization of human rights. Therefore, human rights should not only dictate how a state treats its own people but also how a state treats the people of other countries, insulating them and protecting innocent civilians from the harms of war.
    • Affective Images

      Kesting, Marietta (SUNY Press, 2017-12-10)
      Affective Images examines both canonical and lesser-known photographs and films that address the struggle against apartheid and the new struggles that came into being in post-apartheid times. Marietta Kesting argues for a way of embodied seeing and complements this with feminist and queer film studies, history of photography, media theory, and cultural studies. Featuring in-depth discussions of photographs, films, and other visual documents, Kesting then situates them in broader historical contexts, such as cultural history and the history of black subjectivity and revolves the images around the intersection of race and gender. In its interdisciplinary approach, this book explores the recurrence of affective images of the past in a different way, including flashbacks, trauma, "white noise," and the return of the repressed. It draws its materials from photographers, filmmakers, and artists such as Ernest Cole, Simphiwe Nkwali, Terry Kurgan, Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, Adze Ugah, and the Center for Historical Reenactments.