Wall to Wall: Law as Culture in Latin America and Spain

Edited by Carlos Varon, UC Riverside et al.

March 2021 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-160-1
Availability: In stock
231pp. ¦ $59 £44 €50

'Wall to Wall: Law as Culture in Latin America and Spain' comprises interventions from a wide array of scholars based in the US, Spain, and Latin America, exploring the encounter of Hispanophone cultures and the law. Its contributors delineate a fraught relationship of complicity, negotiation, and outright confrontation covering five centuries and a truly global landscape, from Inquisitorial processes at the onset of the Spanish Empire to last-ditch plans to preserve it in the 19th century Philippines, to the challenges to contemporary articulations of the nation-state in Catalonia. Beyond single, specialized time-period and national cultures, 'Wall to Wall' embraces and showcases the heterogeneity of the field, covering both well-known territory (Argentina, Mexico, Spain) and often-neglected cultures (Venezuela, Philippines, and indigenous communities in the Yucatan area), as well as problems that cannot be narrowed down to the nation-state (exile, independence processes, non-state laws, translation of foreign cultures). Contributors include: Aurélie Vialette, Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza, Daniela Dorfman, María Fernanda Lander, Gloria Elizabeth Chacón, Iván Trujillo, Benjamin Easton, Pauline de Tholozany, Lauren G.J. Reynolds, Ignasi Gozalo-Salellas, and Gabriela Balcarce. The chapters included foreground the conceptual diversity of the field, in dialogue with issues in literary and visual culture, (post-)colonialism, race, nationalism, gender, and class. Not only do they place vernacular objects in dialogue with current international concepts and methods, but these essays also aim to advance an autonomous conceptual and theoretical work-based approach. Its chapters aspire to enter a global discussion around the state-centered aspiration to shape culture and the many literary and cultural practices that escape it; researchers of those issues and Latin American and Iberian studies will find new venues to rethink their global archive.

臺勢教會 The Taiwanese Making of the Canada Presbyterian Mission

Mark A. Dodge

December 2020 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-119-9
Availability: In stock
278pp. ¦ $64 £48 €54

"臺勢教會 The Taiwanese Making of the Canada Presbyterian Mission" explores the Canadian Presbyterian Mission to Northern Taiwan, 1872-1915. The Canada Presbyterian Mission has often been portrayed as one of the nineteenth- century’s most successful missions, and its founder, George Leslie Mackay, has been called the most successful Protestant Missionary of all time. Mark Dodge challenges the heroic narrative by exploring the motives and actions of the Taiwanese actors who supported and established the mission. Religious leaders, teachers, doctors, and businessmen from Northern Taiwan collaborated to build a strong and vital mission, whose phenomenal success brought fame and status to Mackay and their cause. In turn, this status provided a protective space in which these Taiwanese patrons were able to exert significant economic and political autonomy in spite of pressures from competing colonial interests. This book will be of particular interest to students and historians of nineteenth-century East Asia as well as scholars of comparative colonialism, with a focus on missionary history and cultural colonialism.

Topics on Art and Money

Edited by Adrià Harillo Pla, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China

January 2021 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-048-2
Availability: In stock
174pp. ¦ $43 £33 €37

The title of this book is intended to be an honest one, far from exaggerated phrases and empty meanings. Three words, a preposition, and a coordinating conjunction: ‘Topics on Art and Money’. A coordinating conjunction, not a subordinating one, since this book does not intend to express a hierarchical order. As all words united by a coordinating conjunction, this book intends to connect them. As simple as that. This book presents, through the chapters written by its authors, some of the ways in which Art and Money are linked. In order to observe this relationship, this book consists of authors whose analysis refers to political propaganda, historical events with artistic repercussions or strictly economic analysis of the art market, for example. “And” connects, “or” divides. This book not only presents a connection between Art and Money, but between academics from different fields and geographical areas. This humble book presents, precisely, how individuals from different specialties think of this relationship. It will appeal to academics dedicated to Arts Economics and Cultural Management, professionals from the art market/world with an interest in works of an academic nature, and general readers with an interest in this topic and a strong knowledge of Arts Economics.

Complex Society: In the Middle of a Middle World

Bojan Radej, Slovenian Evaluation Society, Slovenia and Mojca Golobič, University of Ljubljana; Slovenian Evaluation Society, Slovenia

November 2020 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-019-2
Availability: In stock
240pp. ¦ $60 £45 €51

The decreasing capacity to govern complex social processes results in negative trends that breach system thresholds in all main social domains with extreme economic stratification of society. Independent studies steadily report that a strong majority of the world’s population, between 60% and 80%, already feels excluded and no longer represented by their governments. The two prevailing concepts of complexity seem to overlook the central importance of mesoscopic complexity. Socially complex conditions call for a new kind of social thought specifically developed for a blinded generation that must be as different from modern and postmodern thoughts, as they were different from their middle-age precedents. 'Complex Society: In the Middle of a Middle World', addresses the concerns of the excluded majority by explaining how present complex social conditions work in favor of generational aspirations to achieve a more positive future. In the geometry of thinking, a complex matter is not comprehensible objectively, but only by evaluating overlaps between complexity domains on their periphery, which is in the area of their inconsistencies. The book first develops an evaluative methodology for studying complex social matters and then tests it with three case studies that reflect some of the most pressing problems in contemporary societies: aggregation problem, integration problem, and organization problem. The obtained findings give grounds for the depiction of an outline for the ‘anti-postmodern’ ordering of contemporary societies. This ground-breaking text will be of particular interest for graduate and post-graduate level of social sciences, evaluators of project, program and policy impact evaluation, evaluators of philosophy of science, as well as methodologists of social research and public governance.

Love as human virtue and human need and its role in the lives of long-term prisoners

A multidisciplinary exploration

Christina Valeska Straub, University of Leeds

November 2020 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-966-0
Availability: In stock
238pp. ¦ $62 £46 €52

While the importance of love is rarely questioned, the effects of its presence and absence in certain environments often goes unnoticed. This book analyses the role of love in the lives of prisoners in a low security English prison. It seeks to provide a deeper insight into the meaning and role of love as a dual concept in the social-ecology of human existence, human development and well-being, and sets out to encourage a critical and practical (re)consideration of the potential benefits of love´s (re)inclusion into the prison set-up and purpose. This qualitative multidisciplinary analysis – based on psychological, moral philosophical, neuroscientific, and sociological literature – will appeal to postgraduates and early career researchers across the social sciences, as well practitioners of Criminal Justice and others interested in offender rehabilitation, and the effects of prison.