Dialoguing With Critical Race Theory: Constitutional and Christian Links

Mark Ellingsen, Interdenominational Theological Center

ISBN: 978-1-64889-896-9
Availability: Forthcoming
$54 £43 €50

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is certainly a hot topic. It is no longer just the legal theory it was originally designed to be, but has spread to other academic disciplines and has become an icon for determining which side you are on concerning racism. Most of the loudest voices, especially in the debate about CRT in our schools, seem not to have actually studied the theory. Dialoguing with Critical Race Theory is a book that remedies this problem, offering a summary of CRT’s actual analysis and prescriptions. Along the way, the book evaluates the standard critiques of the theory. This is a book to get Americans to stop all the shouting and really find out what CRT teaches. This is a book that might contribute to getting more civility into our public discourse. The next agenda addressed by this volume is to point out how the skepticism CRT articulates regarding white political activities allegedly on behalf of African Americans is in line with the suppositions of the U.S. Constitution. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, at least by implication, teach us that the white faction in American society will always seek its own advantage. Nobody is noting these overlaps between our system and CRT! With this point established, it is pointed out how such insights themselves are in line with Augustine and defenders of the Christian doctrine of sin. If you are Christian, knowing that you are a sinner, then all the white defensiveness over whether America is racist goes away. White (and Black) Christian parents ought to want their kids to learn in the schools about their complicity in racism! Our public debates will be quite different when links between CRT, the Christian faith, and our Constitutional system get taken seriously. It will be hard to deny this after reading Dialoguing with Critical Race Theory. With these relationships between CRT and our Constitutional system as well as with the Christian faith established, this short book closes by pointing out observations of Madison and Hamilton in The Federalist Papers, which not only converge with CRT’s analysis, but also offer some possible remedies to our structural racism. We’ll see that the Constitution is not “racially neutral,” that many of the Founders deemed the new government as structured in such a way as to terminate the slave trade, that “Black lives do matter” in accord with their “original intent.” Likewise, though it is often overlooked, at least some Founders (esp Franklin, Hamilton, and Madison) understood a good government as concerned to protect the poor. And in a similar fashion, links to Christian faith entail that racial differences are not ultimate, not a big deal genetically, since we are all one. To this commitment, the Biblical witness also reflects an emphasis on caring for the poor. This stress on seeking a unity which cuts across economic and ethnic lines entails both an affirmation of points made by CRT proponents, but also a critique of the theory’s separatist and subjectivist tendencies. These Christian insights are related to the latest findings drawn from the Theory of Evolution, whose leading proponents today point out that our cooperative propensities are what account for the success of the human race. Of course, something like that has been taught for nearly 2 millennia by the Christian faith. The Christian and Evolutionary belief that we can discern a common morality represents an amendment of CRT’s position, which might render it more effective in accomplishing its aims as it gains broader public support. The book closes with the question of whether CRT is not really as American and wholesome as the Constitution and Christian faith, a debate which can remove a lot of the nastiness among Americans that’s been rising to the surface and not allowed real debate.

Living the Independence Dream: Ukraine and Ukrainians in Contemporary Socio-Political Context

Edited by Lada Kolomiyets

ISBN: 978-1-64889-861-7
Availability: Pre-order
$114 £91 €106

For many Ukrainians, 1991 was a crucial point when their long-held dream of independence came true. The image of the future life in independent Ukraine was then almost identical to folklore images of Ukraine as the land of milk and honey. "Living the Independence Dream" takes a multi-dimensional look at the period of regained independence as a time of advancement towards the realization of collective dreams shaping the post-Soviet nation, even through everyday disappointments, anxiety, and uncertainty. The collection features personal accounts of several generations of Ukrainians who found themselves displaced by political upheavals in foreign lands, as well as the voices of recently displaced people who left the Donbas or other regions of Ukraine following the outbreak of the Russian aggression. It revisits the legacy of Soviet dissidents and explores the ideologies of Ukrainian language revival and the ways that memory and language construct Ukrainian identity and generate vital energy amidst war. The collection "Living the Independence Dream" aims to analyze the agency of contemporary Ukrainian people and the role of media, literature, and digital folklore in creating new messages, meanings, and values formed during the Independence decades.

THAWZEN Moments: Autoethnographic piano teaching and learning stories

Jeeyeon Ryu, Yorkville University

April 2024 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-930-0
Availability: In stock
210pp. [Color] ¦ $65 £54 €61

THAWZEN Moments: Autoethnographic Piano Teaching and Learning Stories is a collection of 46 vignettes, digitally edited photographs, poems, and reflective-reflexive narratives about children’s imaginative, creative, and magical lifeworlds of exploring music and piano playing. There are many ways of learning to play the piano, THAWZEN different ways of re/imagining music. There are many stories to share with you, never-ending questions to explore together. The stories included in this book are our happy piano play, our shared musical journeys in re/creating more meaningful and joyful piano teaching and learning experiences.

Topics and approaches to studying intelligence

Edited by Andrew Macpherson, University of New Hampshire and Glenn P. Hastedt, James Madison University

ISBN: 978-1-64889-881-5
Availability: Forthcoming
$81 £65 €76

The goal of "Topics and approaches to studying intelligence" is to bring into sharper focus the evolving nature of intelligence studies, which is in the midst of a period of significant expansion that is taking place across a number of dimensions. Working on this foundation of past and contemporary analytic intelligence studies, the chapters in "Topics and approaches to studying intelligence" highlight areas of debate and disagreement, provide insight into new areas of study and broaden the methodological toolset used by researchers. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches investigate analysis, alliances, competitive/private sector intelligence, gendered practices of intelligence agencies, the nature of intelligence studies scholarship, accreditation, intelligence disclosure for diplomacy, and the sharing of nuclear-related intelligence

Chronicles of Care: A Design History of the COVID-19 Virus

Fernando Galdon, Royal College of Art, UK et al.

April 2024 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-950-8
Availability: In stock
372pp. [Color] ¦ $97 £77 €90

The Covid-19 crisis and the designed interventions that the authors have catalogued in this book prove definitively that design does care. The authors documented this as it evolved every day from the 1st January 2020 to 31st May 2020 inclusive. Then they looked at all of this care and caring from the point of view of design and, by the sheer volume of design interventions they have documented, illustrate that design is good in a crisis. What the Covid-19 pandemic illustrated is that for the first time in modern history, capital was totally irrelevant. Money could not save your life. Only design could. Rapidly designed masks, shelters, hospitals, instructional posters, infographics, dashboards, respirators, sanitisers, virtual and local communities emerged to save us. From January 2020, design became king. The Covid-19 global pandemic presented an ontological reality; design is more than margins or profit. In fact, design became extremely valuable when it stopped concentrating on those things and started to care about peoples’ lives. This brief episode in history is still repositioning the status of design and reconfiguring its signifier from consumption to care. The contents of this book cover the outbreak, lockdown, and the beginning of the reopening in the UK. In between, the book functions as a history of pandemic crisis design interventions. As such it is a “research-in-the-moment project” where we have illustrated our thoughts and insights in tables, charts and diagrams. We have accepted all design interventions as valid and given them the same role and status by presenting each of them in a standard format. No curation. No selection. No position. The task of critical analysis must follow – perhaps by us, certainly by others.