Mary Taylor Huber - Böcker

Irony today extends beyond its classification as a figure of speech and is increasingly recognized as one of the major modes of human experience. This idea of irony as an integral force in social life is at the center of this provocative book. The result of a meeting where anthropologists were invited to explore the politics of irony and the moral responsibilities that accompany its recognition, this book is one of the first to lend an anthropological perspective to this contemporary phenomenon.The first group of essays explores the limits to irony's liberating qualities from the constrained use of irony in congressional hearings to its reactive presence amid widening disparities of wealth despite decades of world development. The second section presents irony's more positive dimensions through an array of examples such as the use of irony by Chinese writers and Irish humorists. Framed by the editors' theoretical introduction to the issues posed by irony and responses to the essays by two literary scholars, Irony in Action is a timely contribution in the contemporary reinvention of anthropology.

Throughout the age of Western colonial expansion, Christian missionaries were important participants in the encounter between the West and peoples throughout the rest of the world. Mission schools, health services, and other cultural technologies helped secure Western colonialism, and in some cases transformed or even undermined colonialism's effect. The very breadth of missionaries's focus, however, made the involvement of women in missionary work both possible and necessary.Missionary groups thus faced more immediately the destabilizing challenges that colonial experience posed to their own ways of organizing relations between women and men. Examining the changing prospects for professional women in the missions, the contributors to Gendered Missions ask how these shaped, and were shaped by, crucial practical, political, and religious developments at home and abroad. While the focus is on the tumultuous period that historian Eric Hobsbawm calls "The Age of Empire" (1875-1914), attention also is paid to how gender has been debated in later colonial and post-colonial missions.Scholars from any field concerned with colonial and postcolonial societies or with gender and women's history should find this book of special interest. In addition, Gendered Missions should appeal to readers in church history, mission studies, and the sociology of religion.Mary Taylor Huber is Senior Scholar, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Nancy C. Lutkehaus is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Southern California.

Scholarship Assessed continues the exploration begun by Scholarship Reconsidered. It examines the changing nature of scholarship in today's colleges and universities and proposes new standards with a special emphasis on methods for assessment and documentation. Begun under the oversight of Ernest L. Boyer, and based on the findings of the Carnegie Foundation's National Survey on the Reexamination of Faculty Roles and Rewards, Scholarship Assessed provides a base of information for and gives focus to the debate of institutional standards of rigor and quality.

A publication of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, this important resource builds on the work of Carnegie's best-selling books, Scholarship Reconsidered and Scholarship Assessed. The Advancement of Learning explores the premise that the scholarship of teaching and learning holds the key to improving the quality of higher education. The Advancement of Learning answers questions readers are likely to have: What are the defining elements of the scholarship of teaching and learning?What traditions does it build on?What are its distinctive claims and possibilities?What are the implications of the scholarship of teaching and learning for academic culture and careers?How does it shape the student experience?In addition, authors Mary Taylor Huber and Pat Hutchings introduce a new concept that expands on the scholarship of teaching and learning--the teaching commons. As the authors explain, the teaching commons is a conceptual space in which communities of educators committed to inquiry and innovation come together to exchange ideas about teaching and learning and use them to meet the challenges of educating students for personal, professional, and civic life.

Ten sets of disciplinary scholars respond to an orienting essay that raises questions about the history of discourse about teaching and learning in the disciplines, the ways in which disciplinary "styles" influence inquiry into teaching and learning, and the nature and roles of interdisciplinary exchange. The authors hope to "contribute to a common language for trading ideas, enlarging our pedagogical imaginations, and strengthening our scholarly work." Disciplines represented: chemistry; communication studies, engineering, English studies, history, management sciences, mathematics, psychology, and sociology. A collaboration of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and AAHE