Mantha: Alchemies of the Cultural Turn

Mark K. Warford, SUNY Buffalo State University

Set against the rich and troubled tapestry of the West’s Greco-Roman inheritance, the Sanskrit root 'manth/-', which roughly translates to “a churn” ('mantha') or “to churn” ('manth') in Sanskrit, serves as a cauldron into which age-old binaries are blended. A mantha of the Greek metaphysical notion of the One and the Many drives explorations of a variety of themes, including the Feminine and the Masculine, Self and Other, East and West, Heroes and Monsters, Olympians and Titans, Creativity and Innovation. Accordingly, the psychoanalytic canon is (re)introduced to a diversity of perspectives, from linguistics and Translation Studies to educational theory and horror fiction. Guided by the 'Opus Contra Culturam', Warford, infusing his background in linguistics, Translation Studies, Spanish, Sociocultural Theory, and Global Humanities, demonstrates the importance of stretching beyond what is known in one’s cultural milieu, that “one” taking many forms: the citizen, the student, the professional, the innovator, the scholar, and the infinite intersections of group identifications into which we are susceptible to being siloed. Specific topics include cultural complexes and trauma, Titanism, integrative approaches to human development and learning theory, the Monstrous, as well as creativity and innovation studies.

The Changing Faces of Higher Education

From Boomers to Millennials

Edited by Mitchell B. Mackinem, Wingate University et al.

In a time of rapid change and arising challenges, Millennials are the latest generation to enter high education institutions as junior faculty, administrators, researchers, and scholars. As with each generation they bring new values, perspectives, technological expertise, and expectations. Higher education is facing potentially overwhelming challenges in finances, student debt, relevance, non-traditional hiring, with some institutions facing closure. Academic leaders, often Baby Boomers, attempt to meet these challenges while still tied to traditions from a bygone time. The Changing Faces of Higher Education gives voice to Millennial academics and their perspective of higher education. This thought-provoking volume provides the insights and lessons from Millennials working in higher education across various subfields. The contributing authors speak from divergent institutions including small mid-western private colleges to larger East coast public institutions and many locations in-between. The contributing authors are not limited to faculty but covers a range of professionals working in higher education. While diverse, all the authors focus on the challenges in teaching, mentorship, and leadership, challenges related to diversity, and improving technology and research. The thirteen chapters in this book address ongoing challenges faced by Millennials working in higher education, offers advice and best practices, and addresses the ways that Millennials serve as a bridge between their “Boomer” colleagues and Gen Z who make up the majority of currently enrolled college students. Each chapter presents the experiences of the author(s) and the strategies utilized to navigate the increasingly fast changing landscape of higher education.

The Community and the Algorithm: A Digital Interactive Poetics

Edited by Andrew Klobucar, New Jersey Institute of Technology

Digital media presents an array of interesting challenges adapting new modes of collaborative, online communication to traditional writing and literary practices at the practical and theoretical levels. For centuries, popular concepts of the modern author, regardless of genre, have emphasized writing as a solo exercise in human communication, while the act of reading remains associated with solitude and individual privacy. “The Community and the Algorithm: A Digital Interactive Poetics” explores important cultural changes in these relationships thanks to the rapid development of digital internet technologies allowing near-instantaneous, synchronous, multimedia interaction across the globe. The radical shift in how we author and consume media as an online, electronic transmission effectively resituates the writing process across the liberal arts as less a solitary act of individual enquiry and reflection, and more an ongoing, collaborative process of creative interaction within a multimedia environment or network. Contributions in this anthology demonstrate a robust history and equally diverse contemporary approach to multimedia interaction for literary and artistic ends. Central to all media formats, computation is explored throughout this volume to critically examine how algorithmic procedures in writing help bring forward many key concepts to building creative communities in a digital environment. Each chapter in this book accordingly introduces readers to various new collaborative experiments using a broad range of different digital media formats, including VR, Natural Language Generation (NLG), and metagaming tools. This book will appeal broadly to students, instructors, and independent artists working in the digital arts, while its emphasis on social interactivity will interest theorists and teachers working in theatre, social media, and cyberpsychology. Its secondary focus on computation and media programming as a site of artistic experimentation will also interest programmers and web designers at various professional levels.

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

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.

An Introduction to Computational Macroeconomics

Anelí Bongers, Universidad de Málaga, Spain et al.

This book presents an introduction to computational macroeconomics, using a new approach to the study of dynamic macroeconomic models. It solves a variety of models in discrete time numerically, using a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet as a computer tool. The solved models include dynamic macroeconomic models with rational expectations, both non-microfounded and microfounded, constituting a novel approach that facilitates the learning and use of dynamic general equilibrium models, which have now become the principal tool for macroeconomic analysis. Spreadsheets are widely known and relatively easy to use, meaning that the computer skills needed to work with dynamic general equilibrium models are affordable for undergraduate students in Advanced Macroeconomics courses.