Estranged Familiarity

Download Estranged Familiarity full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Estranged Familiarity ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!

Navigating Family Estrangement

Author : Karl Melvin
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1040038581
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (4 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Navigating Family Estrangement by : Karl Melvin

Download or read book Navigating Family Estrangement written by Karl Melvin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-28 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Family estrangement and the stigma attached to it are complex phenomena affecting a great number of people in various ways. In response, Navigating Family Estrangement offers a deep dive into the reality of being estranged in contemporary society. This practical guide looks at how to effectively help estranged adults achieve better outcomes from a variety of perspectives. The author explores the difficulties of working with estrangement, including professional roadblocks such as the six biases that prevent connecting with a client's experience. He delves into the unique seven-step Estrangement Inquiry Model that aims to provide important insight into a client's family history, map out the present estrangement dynamic, and highlight the types of interventions to support their needs. Combining research from a range of different fields with the author's decade of clinical experience, the book is supplemented with five comprehensive case studies to demonstrate the practical strategies that address estrangement challenges. This book offers a clear and collaborative approach to a topic that will be relevant for a range of professionals, including psychotherapists, psychologists, counsellors and social workers.

Estranged familiarity

Author : Stéphane Beel
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 252 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Estranged familiarity by : Stéphane Beel

Download or read book Estranged familiarity written by Stéphane Beel and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Family Estrangement

Author : Kylie Agllias
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1317136608
Total Pages : 229 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (171 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Family Estrangement by : Kylie Agllias

Download or read book Family Estrangement written by Kylie Agllias and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Family estrangement is larger than conflict and more complicated than betrayal. It is entwined in contradictory beliefs, values, behaviours and goals and is the result of at least one member of the family considering reconciliation impossible and/or undesirable. The cessation of familial relations, whether that involves rejection or deciding to leave, can be an inordinately traumatising experience. Whilst data suggests that around 1 in 12 people are estranged from at least one family member this topic is rarely discussed or researched. Based on the author’s in-depth research and exploration of the topic of estrangement, Family Estrangement: A Matter of Perspective captures the unique lived experiences of both estrangee and estranger. Offering multiple perspectives drawn from academic and popular literature as well as case studies, the book contextualises its chapters within current theoretical understandings of family relationships and estrangement, including Loss and Grief theories, Attachment Theory and Bowen Family Systems Theory. Practice sections provide estranged readers and professionals with a structured approach to exploring the various aspects of estrangement within a family and to help them identify resilience, strengths and strategies which individuals may harness as they attempt to live with estrangement. Written with the aim to provide guidance in understanding estrangement in context, this book is suitable for estranged family members and all professionals who encounter and work with people affected by estrangement, including social workers, counsellors, psychologists, allied health professionals, doctors, nurses and legal professions.

The Two-in-one

Author : Rod Michalko
Publisher : Temple University Press
ISBN 13 : 9781566396493
Total Pages : 250 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (964 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Two-in-one by : Rod Michalko

Download or read book The Two-in-one written by Rod Michalko and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Rod Michalko's sight finally became so limited that he no longer felt safe on busy city streets or traveling alone, he began a search for a guide. The Two-in-One is his account of how his search ended with Smokie, a guide dog, and a dramatically different sense of blindness. Few people who regularly encountered Michalko in his neighborhood shops and cafes realized that he was technically blind; like many people with physical disabilities, he had found ways of compensating for his impairment. Those who knew about his condition thought of him as a fully realized person who just happened to be blind. He thought so himself. Until Smokie changed all that. In this often moving, always compelling meditation on his relationship with Smokie, Michalko probes into what it means to be at home with blindness. Smokie makes no judgment about Michalko's lack of sight; it simply is the condition within which they work together. Their partnership thus allows Michalko to step outside of the conventional-and even "enlightened"-understanding of blindness; he becomes not simply resigned to it but able to embrace it as an essential part of his being in the world. Drawing on his training as a sociologist and his experience as a disabled person, Michalko joins a still small circle of scholars who examine disability from the inside. More rare still-and what will resonate with most readers-is Michalko's remarkable portrayal of Smokie; avoiding sentimentality and pathos, it is a deeply affectionate yet restrained and nuanced appreciation of his behavior and personality. From their first meeting at the dog guide training school, Smokie springs to life in these pages as a highly competent, sure-footed, take-charge, full-speed-ahead, indispensable partner. "Sighties" are always in awe watching them work; Michalko has even persuaded some of them that the Smokester can locate street addresses-but has a little difficulty with odd numbers! Readers of The Two-in-One can easily imagine Rod and Smokie sharing the joke as they continue on their way. Author note: Rod Michalko is Adjunct Professor of Sociology, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, St. Francis Xavier University.

Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature

Author : Douglas Robinson
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 0801896312
Total Pages : 339 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (18 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature by : Douglas Robinson

Download or read book Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature written by Douglas Robinson and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2008-04-28 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing together the estrangement theories of Viktor Shklovsky and Bertolt Brecht with Leo Tolstoy's theory of infection, Douglas Robinson studies the ways in which shared evaluative affect regulates both literary familiarity—convention and tradition—and modern strategies of alienation, depersonalization, and malaise. This book begins with two assumptions, both taken from Tolstoy's late aesthetic treatise What Is Art? (1898): that there is a malaise in culture, and that literature's power to "infect" readers with the moral values of the author is a possible cure for this malaise. Exploring these ideas of estrangement within the contexts of earlier, contemporary, and later critical theory, Robinson argues that Shklovsky and Brecht follow Tolstoy in their efforts to fight depersonalization by imbuing readers with the transformative guidance of collectivized feeling. Robinson's somatic approach to literature offers a powerful alternative to depersonalizing structuralist and poststructuralist theorization without simply retreating into conservative rejection and reaction. Both a comparative study of Russian and German literary-theoretical history and an insightful examination of the somatics of literature, this groundbreaking work provides a deeper understanding of how literature affects the reader and offers a new perspective on present-day problems in poststructuralist approaches to the human condition.

The Legitimacy of Truth

Author : Riccardo Dottori
Publisher : LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN 13 : 9783825867027
Total Pages : 452 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (67 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Legitimacy of Truth by : Riccardo Dottori

Download or read book The Legitimacy of Truth written by Riccardo Dottori and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2003 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains the Proceedings of the Third meeting Italian/American Philosophy that took place in Rome in June 5-10, 2001. What is "Truth" in Analytic Philosophy after the linguistic turn? What can we say about "Truth" in Hermeneutics, after taking into account the so-called hermeneutical circle? According to Nietzsche: "Truth is that form of error without which human beings could not live." From this definition it follows: "The point is not the rightness of theory but its importance for human existence." Could we say the same from an epistemological point of view? Who (or what) could be the neutral arbiter among different conceptual schemes? Can an interpretative paradigm stand in as a substitute for traditional objectivity? The controversial problem of "Truth," however, must be discussed within the various fields of philosophy: Aesthetics, Logic, Epistemology, Ethics and Politics. In view of this, Hermeneutics and Analytic Philosophy converged to create the body of this meetin

Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies

Author : Nick Watson
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429774095
Total Pages : 830 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (297 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies by : Nick Watson

Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies written by Nick Watson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-21 with total page 830 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fully revised and expanded second edition of the Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies takes a multidisciplinary approach to disability and provides an authoritative and up-to-date overview of the main issues in the field around the world today. Adopting an international perspective and arranged thematically, it surveys the state of the discipline, examining emerging and cutting-edge areas as well as core areas of contention. Divided in five parts, this comprehensive handbook covers: Different models and approaches to disability. How key impairment groups have engaged with disability studies and the writings within the discipline. Policy and legislation responses to disability studies and to disability activism. Disability studies and its interaction with other disciplines, such as history, philosophy, sport, and science and technology studies. Disability studies and different life experiences, examining how disability and disability studies intersects with ethnicity, sexuality, gender, childhood and ageing. Containing 15 revised chapters and 12 new chapters from an international selection of leading scholars, this authoritative handbook is an invaluable reference for all academics, researchers, and more advanced students in disability studies and associated disciplines such as sociology, health studies and social work. Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Culture - Theory - Disability

Author : Anne Waldschmidt
Publisher : transcript Verlag
ISBN 13 : 3839425336
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (394 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Culture - Theory - Disability by : Anne Waldschmidt

Download or read book Culture - Theory - Disability written by Anne Waldschmidt and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2017-04-10 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Which theoretical and methodological approaches of contemporary cultural criticism resonate within the field of disability studies? What can cultural studies gain by incorporating disability more fully into its toolbox for critical analysis? Culture - Theory - Disability features contributions by leading international cultural disability studies scholars which are complemented with a diverse range of responses from across the humanities spectrum. This essential volume encourages the problematization of disability in connection with critical theories of literary and cultural representation, aesthetics, politics, science and technology, sociology, and philosophy. It includes essays by Lennard J. Davis, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Dan Goodley, Robert McRuer and Margrit Shildrick.

American Poets in the 21st Century

Author : Claudia Rankine
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780819567284
Total Pages : 424 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (672 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis American Poets in the 21st Century by : Claudia Rankine

Download or read book American Poets in the 21st Century written by Claudia Rankine and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2007-07-09 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ideal introduction to the current generation of American poets

Letters with Smokie

Author : Rod Michalko
Publisher : Univ. of Manitoba Press
ISBN 13 : 1772840351
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (728 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Letters with Smokie by : Rod Michalko

Download or read book Letters with Smokie written by Rod Michalko and published by Univ. of Manitoba Press. This book was released on 2023-09-22 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leave it to a dog to put the “human” back in “humanities” In September 2020, Rod Michalko wrote to friend and colleague Dan Goodley, congratulating him on the release of his latest book, Disability and Other Human Questions. Joking that his late guide dog, Smokie, had taken offense to the suggestion that disability was purely a human question, Michalko shared a few thoughts on behalf of his dog. When Goodley wrote back—to Smokie—so began an epistolic exchange that would continue for the next seven months. As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world and the realities of lockdown-imposed isolation set in, the Smokie letters provided the friends a space in which to come together in a lively exploration of human-animal relationships and to interrogate disability as disruption, disturbance, and art. Just as he did in life, Smokie guides. In these pages, he offers wisdom about the world, love, friendship, and even The Beatles. His canine observations of human experience provide an avenue into some of the ways blindness might be reconceptualized and “befriended.” Uninhibited by the trappings of traditional academic inquiry, Michalko and Goodley are unleashed, free to wander, to wonder, and to provoke within the bonds of trust and respect. Funny and thoughtful, the result is a refreshing exploration and re-evaluation of learned cultural misunderstandings of disability.

What You Will

Author : Kathryn Schwarz
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812205030
Total Pages : 317 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis What You Will by : Kathryn Schwarz

Download or read book What You Will written by Kathryn Schwarz and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-06-24 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In What You Will Kathryn Schwarz traces a curious pattern in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century representations of femininity: women pose a threat when they conform too willingly to social conventions. Exemplary texts describe chaste women who kill their rapists, constant wives who make marriage a debilitating obligation, and devoted mothers who destroy the fitness of children. These cautionary tales draw attention to the more ordinary, necessary choices that take prescribed roles as a mandate for purposeful acts. For early modern narratives, writes Schwarz, intentional compliance poses a complex problem: it sustains crucial tenets of order and continuity but unsettles the hierarchical premises from which those tenets derive. Feminine will appears as a volatile force within heterosociality, lending contingent security to a system that depends less on enforced obedience than on contract and consent. The book begins with an examination of early modern disciplines that treat will as an aspect of the individual psyche, of rhetoric, and of sexual and gendered identities. Drawing on these readings, Schwarz turns to Shakespearean works in which feminine characters articulate and manage the values that define them, revealing the vital force of conventional acts. Her analysis engages with recent research that has challenged the premise of feminine subordination, both by identifying alternative positions and by illuminating resistance within repressive structures. Schwarz builds on this awareness of disparate modes and sites of action in formulating the book's central questions: With what agency, and to what effect, do feminine subjects inhabit the conventions of femininity? In what sense are authenticity and masquerade inseparable aspects of social performance? How might coercive systems produce effective actors? What possibilities emerge from the paradox of prescribed choice? Her conclusions have implications not only for early modern scholarship but also for histories of gender and sexuality, queer studies, and theories of the relationship between subjectivity and ideological constraint.

Naming Race, Naming Racisms

Author : Jonathan Judaken
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317991567
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (179 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Naming Race, Naming Racisms by : Jonathan Judaken

Download or read book Naming Race, Naming Racisms written by Jonathan Judaken and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eschewing social scientific approaches, which tend to examine race and racism in terms of quasi-static ideal types, this book surveys differing historical contexts from the era of scientific racism in the nineteenth-century to the post-racial racism of the post 9/11 period, and from Europe to the United States, in order to understand how racism has been articulated in differing situations. It is distinguished by the attention it pays to the on-going power of racial discourse in the contemporary period as a legitimating factor in oppression. It exemplifies methodological openness, combining the work of historians, philosophers, religious scholars, and literary critics, and includes differing theoretical models in pursuing a critical approach to race: cultural studies; trauma theory and psychoanalysis; critical theory and consideration of the "new racism"; and postcolonialism and the literature on globalization. It brings together the work of leading academics with younger practitioners and is capped off by an interview with world-renowned intellectual Cornel West on black intellectuals in America. This book was previously published as a special issue of Patterns of Prejudice.

Sustaining Disabled Youth

Author : Federico R. Waitoller
Publisher : Teachers College Press
ISBN 13 : 0807781398
Total Pages : 177 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (77 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Sustaining Disabled Youth by : Federico R. Waitoller

Download or read book Sustaining Disabled Youth written by Federico R. Waitoller and published by Teachers College Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asset-based pedagogies, such as culturally relevant/sustaining teaching, are frequently used to improve the educational experiences of students of color and to challenge the White curriculum that has historically informed school practices. Yet asset-based pedagogies have evaded important aspects of students’ culture and identity: those related to disability. Sustaining Disabled Youth is the first book to accomplish this. It brings together a collection of work that situates disability as a key aspect of children and youth’s cultural identity construction. It explores how disability intersects with other markers of difference to create unique cultural repertoires to be valued, sustained, and utilized for learning. Readers will hear from prominent and emerging scholars and activists in disability studies who engage with the following questions: Can disability be considered an identity and culture in the same ways that race and ethnicity are? How can disability be incorporated to develop and sustain asset-based pedagogies that attend to intersecting forms of marginalization? How can disability serve in inquiries on the use of asset-based pedagogies? Do all disability identities and embodiments merit sustaining? How can disability justice be incorporated into other efforts toward social justice? Book Features: Provides critical insights to bring disability in conversation with asset-based pedagogies.Highlights contributions of both university scholars and community activists. Includes analytical and practical tools for researchers, classroom teachers, and school administrators. Offers important recommendations for teacher education programs.

The Culture of the Copy

Author : Hillel Schwartz
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 193540850X
Total Pages : 473 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (354 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Culture of the Copy by : Hillel Schwartz

Download or read book The Culture of the Copy written by Hillel Schwartz and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013-12-27 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel attempt to make sense of our preoccupation with copies of all kinds—from counterfeits to instant replay, from parrots to photocopies. The Culture of the Copy is a novel attempt to make sense of the Western fascination with replicas, duplicates, and twins. In a work that is breathtaking in its synthetic and critical achievements, Hillel Schwartz charts the repercussions of our entanglement with copies of all kinds, whose presence alternately sustains and overwhelms us. This updated edition takes notice of recent shifts in thought with regard to such issues as biological cloning, conjoined twins, copyright, digital reproduction, and multiple personality disorder. At once abbreviated and refined, it will be of interest to anyone concerned with problems of authenticity, identity, and originality. Through intriguing, and at times humorous, historical analysis and case studies in contemporary culture, Schwartz investigates a stunning array of simulacra: counterfeits, decoys, mannequins, and portraits; ditto marks, genetic cloning, war games, and camouflage; instant replays, digital imaging, parrots, and photocopies; wax museums, apes, and art forgeries—not to mention the very notion of the Real McCoy. Working through a range of theories on biological, mechanical, and electronic reproduction, Schwartz questions the modern esteem for authenticity and uniqueness. The Culture of the Copy shows how the ethical dilemmas central to so many fields of endeavor have become inseparable from our pursuit of copies—of the natural world, of our own creations, indeed of our very selves. The book is an innovative blend of microsociology, cultural history, and philosophical reflection, of interest to anyone concerned with problems of authenticity, identity, and originality. Praise for the first edition “[T]he author... brings his considerable synthetic powers to bear on our uneasy preoccupation with doubles, likenesses, facsimiles, replicas and re-enactments. I doubt that these cultural phenomena have ever been more comprehensively or more creatively chronicled.... [A] book that gets you to see the world anew, again.” —The New York Times “A sprightly and disconcerting piece of cultural history” —Terence Hawkes, London Review of Books “In The Culture of the Copy, [Schwartz] has written the perfect book: original and repetitive at once.” —Todd Gitlin, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Doing Disability Differently

Author : Jos Boys
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317693825
Total Pages : 243 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (176 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Doing Disability Differently by : Jos Boys

Download or read book Doing Disability Differently written by Jos Boys and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-05-23 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ground-breaking book aims to take a new and innovative view on how disability and architecture might be connected. Rather than putting disability at the end of the design process, centred mainly on compliance, it sees disability – and ability – as creative starting points for the whole design process. It asks the intriguing question: can working from dis/ability actually generate an alternative kind of architectural avant-garde? To do this, Doing Disability Differently: explores how thinking about dis/ability opens up to critical and creative investigation our everyday social attitudes and practices about people, objects and space argues that design can help resist and transform underlying and unnoticed inequalities introduces architects to the emerging and important field of disability studies and considers what different kinds of design thinking and doing this can enable asks how designing for everyday life – in all its diversity – can be better embedded within contemporary architecture as a discipline offers examples of what doing disability differently can mean for architectural theory, education and professional practice aims to embed into architectural practice, attitudes and approaches that creatively and constructively refuse to perpetuate body 'norms' or the resulting inequalities in access to, and support from, built space. Ultimately, this book suggests that re-addressing architecture and disability involves nothing less than re-thinking how to design for the everyday occupation of space more generally.

Beckett's Words

Author : David Kleinberg-Levin
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1474216889
Total Pages : 329 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (742 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Beckett's Words by : David Kleinberg-Levin

Download or read book Beckett's Words written by David Kleinberg-Levin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-07-30 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At stake in this book is a struggle with language in a time when our old faith in the redeeming of the word-and the word's power to redeem-has almost been destroyed. Drawing on Benjamin's political theology, his interpretation of the German Baroque mourning play, and Adorno's critical aesthetic theory, but also on the thought of poets and many other philosophers, especially Hegel's phenomenology of spirit, Nietzsche's analysis of nihilism, and Derrida's writings on language, Kleinberg-Levin shows how, because of its communicative and revelatory powers, language bears the utopian "promise of happiness," the idea of a secular redemption of humanity, at the very heart of which must be the achievement of universal justice. In an original reading of Beckett's plays, novels and short stories, Kleinberg-Levin shows how, despite inheriting a language damaged, corrupted and commodified, Beckett redeems dead or dying words and wrests from this language new possibilities for the expression of meaning. Without denying Beckett's nihilism, his picture of a radically disenchanted world, Kleinberg-Levin calls attention to moments when his words suddenly ignite and break free of their despair and pain, taking shape in the beauty of an austere yet joyous lyricism, suggesting that, after all, meaning is still possible.

In Near Ruins

Author : Nicholas B. Dirks
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 9780816631230
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (312 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis In Near Ruins by : Nicholas B. Dirks

Download or read book In Near Ruins written by Nicholas B. Dirks and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If culture is suspect, what of cultural theory? At a moment when culture's traditional caretakers -- humanism, philosophy, anthropology, and the nation-state -- are undergoing crisis and mutation, this volume charts the tensions and contradictions in the development and deployment of the concept of culture. A genuinely interdisciplinary venture, In Near Ruins brings together respected writers from the fields of history, anthropology, literary criticism, and communications. Together their essays present an intriguing picture of "culture" at the edges of humanism, of the politics of critical inquiry amid current social transformations, of the status and practice of historical knowledge in an age of theory. Skeptical of the concept of culture but fascinated with cultural forms, the authors take up diverse topics, from debates over sexuality in the contemporary United States to relations between empire, capitalism, and gender in nineteenth-century Britain; from poverty in U.S. inner cities to violence in war-torn Sri Lanka; from the operation of nostalgia on cultural practices in Japan to anthropological forms of state power in Indonesia and the writing of history in India. Linked by a common urge to think through the aesthetics and politics of particular social relations amid a variety of globalizing forces -- revolution, colonialism, nationalism, and the disciplinary institutions of the academy itself -- these writers contribute to the ongoing work of remapping the terrain of cultural analysis and reevaluating the stakes in such a daunting effort.