Anthem Impact – serie

"Eisenhower and the Art of Collaborative Leadership" examines the theory and practice of collaboration, and collaborative leadership, in the life and career of Dwight Eisenhower. It relates his collaborative style to his ideas about friendship, his Kansas upbringing and his family, his military training and career, and his particular practice of presidential leadership, which operated through teams and a deliberate, sophisticated system of bureaucratic consensus-building. "Eisenhower and the Art of Collaborative Leadership" elaborates an alternative interpretation of such leadership, describing Eisenhower not merely as a “hidden-hand” president, but also as a visible one at the head of a well-managed team. It is a concise portrait of one of America’s most important and talented leaders, and a case study in sound leadership.

One can approach the notion of otherness or alterity in various ways: politically, aesthetically, ethically, culturally, religiously and sexually. Writing in Saylor.org, Lilia Melani defined the other as an individual who is perceived by the group as not belonging, as being different in some fundamental way. Any stranger becomes the Other. The Other in a society may have few or no legal rights, may be characterized as less intelligent or as immoral, and may even be regarded as sub-human. The collection of essays ‘Notions of Otherness’ addresses many of these approaches as ways of interrogating how varied yet how similar they are in relation to the individual literary texts.

‘The Making of the Modern Chinese Navy’ includes 14 historical case studies that help to illuminate a number of special characteristics of the modern-day Chinese navy most Chinese naval officers perhaps take for granted, including a belief in the Mandate of Heaven, tributary system and the fear of ‘losing face’ either in a diplomatic setting or by risking valuable equipment in battle. Ethnic and language differences, regional loyalties and political mistrust potentially exacerbate these problems. Special peculiarities include the Mongol dual-officer diarchy that led to the political commissar system utilized by the People’s Liberation Army. Outside influences, such as blockade, sanctions or embargoes, can exert a profound impact on China, just as foreign intervention or, equally important, a decision not to intervene, can often determine the outcome of major maritime events. [NP] The 14 case studies discuss many of these characteristics, while the Conclusion examines all case studies together and places them in a historical perspective. ‘The Making of the Modern Chinese Navy’assesses which of these historical characteristics and peculiarities are still present in full force in China and which ones may no longer have as great an impact on the contemporary Chinese navy.

The horror film generally presents a situation where normality is threatened by a monster. From this premise, Theatricality in the Horror Film argues that scary movies often create their terrifying effects stylistically and structurally through a radical break with the realism of normality in the form of monstrous theatricality. Theatricality in the horror fi lm expresses itself in many ways. For example, it comes across in the physical performance of monstrosity: the overthe-top performance of a chainsaw-wielding serial killer whose nefarious gestures terrify both his victims within the film and the audience in the cinema. Theatrical artifice can also appear as a stagy cemetery with broken-down tombstones and twisted, gnarly trees, or through the use of violently aberrant filmic techniques, or in the oppressive claustrophobia of a single-room setting reminiscent of classical drama. Any performative element of a film that flaunts its difference from what is deemed realistic or normal on screen might qualify as an instance of theatrical artifice, creating an intense affect in the audience. This book argues that the artificiality of the frightening spectacle is at the heart of the dark pleasures of horror.

Focusing on four poets who because of their distinctive profiles illustrate especially well the opportunities and pitfalls of writing science poetry during the long eighteenth century Four Augustan Science Poets: Abraham Cowley, James Thomson, Henry Brooke, Erasmus Darwin offers numerous close readings that shed light not only on standard versions of the sublime but also on these idiosyncratic variants: the apologetic (Abraham Cowley), the illicit (James Thomson), the perverse (Henry Brooke) and the atheistic (Erasmus Darwin). Recurrent concerns include the similarities and differences among the languages of poetry, science and religion. Of the poets analyzed all but Thomson wrote extensive notes to accompany their lines, permitting further comparison of languages, in this case between the same authors’ poetry and prose.

‘Bauman, Elias and Latour on Modernity and Its Alternatives’ provides a comparison between the conceptions of modernity and its alternatives in the works of Bauman, Elias and Latour. Their work and research are linked to their distinct views on modernity and its alternatives. For Bauman, the rationality, effectiveness and impersonality that characterize present-day bureaucratic apparatuses are the distinguishing features of modernity. Its post-modern or ‘liquid’ alternative has none of these traits. For Elias, modernity has two different and contrasting faces, that of civilization and barbarity. Elias conceives of civilization as a process connoted by self-control and pacification, which prevail as a consequence of the restraint which honor and morality exert on individuals. By contrast, the breakdown of civilization involves barbarity. For Latour, modernity if defined by a separation between society and nature, or humans and non-humans, has never existed. By virtue of their intimate association, humans and non-humans have formed hybrids, whose proliferation is the hallmark of our age. Modernity, therefore, has never prevailed. Alternatives to hybrids are, in the current age, failed hybrids. The set of alternatives is then as follows: modernity vs. post-modernity (Bauman); civilization vs. barbarity (Elias); and successful vs. unsuccessful hybrids (Latour).

“The Domains of Identity” defines sixteen simple and comprehensive categories of interactions which cause personally identifiable information to be stored in databases. This research, which builds on the synthesis of over 900 academic articles, addresses the challenges of identity management that involve interactions of almost all people in almost all institutional/organizational contexts. Enumerating the sixteen domains and describing the characteristics of each domain clarifies which problems can arise and how they can be solved within each domain.Discussions of identity management are often confusing because they mix issues from multiple domains, or because they try unsuccessfully to apply solutions from one domain to problems in another. This book is an attempt to eliminate the confusion and enable clearer conversations about identity management problems and solutions.

In April 1968, ten months after the Arab defeat of the 1967 June War, Aref El-Rayess’s Dimaʾ wa Hurriyya (Blood and Freedom) opened to the public in the exhibition hall of the L’Orient newspaper headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon. The 5th of June, or, The Changing of Horses, a realist mural painting on canvas, was the exhibition’s centerpiece. With this artwork, El-Rayess declared his commitment to national liberation and socialist revolution. The Changing of Horses was presented and received as an allegory of political commitment, but the slips, silences, and repetitions in the public reception point to its excessive, disturbing, and fundamentally uncanny character. In Commitment in the Artistic Practice of Aref El-Rayess, the first comprehensive study of the work, Natasha Gasparian weaves together a social art history from the artist’s writings, exhibition reviews, guestbook comments, personal correspondences and testimonies, as well as social, political, and aesthetic shifts, particularly as they related to the debates on commitment (iltizam) in the aftermath of the June 1967 war. By attempting to reconstruct this history of the artwork and tracing the caesuras in the discourse around it, Gasparian exposes the social antagonism that is repressed and obfuscated in the idealized narrative sustained by El-Rayess and his audiences. She argues that the oversight in the reception—the critics’ and audiences’ inability to see—attests to the delay in grasping the work historically and signals its avant-gardism.

This book explores the assassination of Antonios Triantafyllides, a leading Cypriot lawyer and politician, in British colonial Cyprus in January 1934. This event has been the infamous subject of rumours since its occurrence and a taboo subject for Cypriot society and historians alike, as the event has been silenced or dismissed. This book explores the assassination in its broadest possible context by situating it within the broader events within the British Empire, the region and the world more generally at that time. The basis for the exploration is a ‘community of records’ through which all the evidence is sifted, reading it both with and against the grain, in order to provide the most likely answer to who was really behind this mysterious cold case. Through rigorous analysis, this book concludes that those who most likely masterminded the assassination supported radical right-wing extremist pro-enosis nationalism and were subsequently also prominent in forming the EOKA terrorist group in the 1950s.

Collected here are the three poetry books with which one of Greece’s finest writers, Tasos Leivaditis, made his literary debut in 1952-53. Greece was at this time emerging out of the devastating destruction of World War II and the subsequent civil war (1946-49). Leivaditis, on the side of the defeated leftists in the civil conflict, paid for his political affiliation by being exiled to concentration camps on various islands for more than three years. Upon his release in 1951, he was to publish in quick succession three remarkable volumes of poetry which draw upon his experiences of violence and persecution, but which are framed by a broader commitment to justice and freedom, love and peace. The three books were immediate successes, and continue to be widely read and discussed in Greece today. Now, for the first time, they are made available to an English-reading audience, who are sure to find in the depth and intensity of Leivaditis’ verses a compelling witness not only to past terrors and tragedies but also to the irrepressible desire to vindicate life and love, because “this star is for all of us.”

This book focuses on two significant architectural elements in traditional Chinese buildings, that is, Dougong and Zaojing. Dougong is a bracket set often sitting above columns and beams as a key component in the great buildings and tombs of imperial China. Zaojing is a special structure sunken into the ceiling, often profusely decorated with carvings and colorful paintings in various motifs. The book inquires about the origin of Dougong and Zaojing in the Chinese Bronze Age, and their heavenly interpretations in the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220). Compared to their later technically oriented development during the Tang to the Qing dynasties (c. 618–1912), and their preservation and innovative reinterpretation in modern times, the rich cultural meanings originally embodied in Dougong and Zaojing have almost disappeared.

The book explores the Gothic tradition in Swedish literature. It aims to give an overview of the development of Swedish Gothic from the Romantic age until today and to highlight the characteristic features of the Swedish tradition of Gothic in relation to transnational developments, in particular in relation to the Anglo-American tradition. By using a contextualising comparative perspective, it highlights the most prevalent and prominent feature of Swedish Gothic, the significance of the Nordic landscape, the wilderness and local folklore. In Swedish fiction, the terror is not pointing to the medieval period but is located in pre-Christian, pagan times. Especially in today’s Gothic narratives, the presence of mythical creatures and nature beings, such as trolls, tomtes or vittras enhances the Gothic atmosphere. Other domestic trends are Gothic crime stories, where supernatural creatures and powers constantly obstruct the modern crime investigation, and the use of gendered and female monsters.

Gulf Gothic examines haunted, secret-laden narratives that emerge from the gulfs between peoples all along the Gulf of Mexico and on both sides of the Rio Grande. The Gulf is presented as a single transnational region and as dynamic ground zero of North American (and global) cross-culturality and trauma. Responding to the long history of Mesoamerican writing, plantation systems, and racialized divides across the region, this study argues that gothic—with all its affect, undead figures, heavy weather, and hauntings—provides a powerful lens through which to awaken the kinds of gulf-traversing vision so necessary to us here and now.

The book discusses so-called real socialism and offers an alternative conceptualization of it as authoritarian collectivism, making use of an analytical methodology, as well as dwelling on its genesis, development and demise. The political dimension stands out in the conceptual articulation, with ‘democratic centralism’ and the prominence of the Communist Party, working from the top down, hierarchically. The book concentrates on the principles of ‘real socialism’, particularly in the Soviet Union but also globally, analysing also its present embrace of capitalism, particularly in China, but also elsewhere, taking account of how these political principles remain however in place today.

The collective complaints procedure was created in 1995 as an optional quasi-jurisdictional monitoring mechanism specific for the protection of social rights, within the framework of the Council of Europe treaty system of the European Social Charter. In recent years, the importance and use of this procedure has increased considerably, in the context of a number of serious economic and social crises which are impacting negatively on the effective enjoyment of social rights in Europe. This short monograph explores and clarifies the specific features, the potential and limits of the collective complaints procedure, intended as a sui generis instrument for the protection of social rights, in the light of its evolutive application by the European Committee of Social Rights (the monitoring body of the European Social Charter) and its real impact on the state and conditions of social rights in the European countries concerned.

This book considers the importance of teaching excellence in higher education and why it is important to recognize it for the goal of improving student learning. It considers the essential attributes of excellence in teaching as well as the main current factors both internally and externally that are driving higher educational institutes to raise their quality of teaching. The book looks at some of the more popular latest teaching methodologies that academics can employ to promote deep learning and enable students to ultimately become independent learners.

Peruvian Foreign Policy in the Modern Era is a chronological treatment of Peruvian foreign policy from 1990 to the present. It focuses on the impact of domestic politics, economic interests, security concerns, and alliance diplomacy on contemporary Peruvian foreign policy.In common with other Latin American states, sovereignty, territorial integrity, regionalism, continental solidarity, and economic independence were core goals of Peruvian foreign policy after independence. In modern times, successive Peruvian governments have continued to address these and related issues in a foreign policy grounded in pragmatism and notable for its emphasis on a rational combination of continuity and change. The Fujimori administration (1990–2000) set the stage for this shift in the direction, tone, and content of the nation’s foreign policy with successor administrations refining and building upon the initiatives launched by Fujimori.

This book is about the presence of music in novels. More specifically, it is about music in the early modern novel, with an emphasis on seventeenth-century musical prose from The Netherlands. It is remarkable that up until now the presence of musical elements in prose works from earlier centuries received almost no attention from academic researchers. This essay provides a concise and an accessible introduction into the subject. It presents an exploration of the role and function of musical elements in seventeenth-century Dutch prose fiction and at the same time offers an overview of this compelling and fascinating new musical-literary territory.

California Gothic explores the California dream and its dark inversion as a nightmare, as illustrated in fiction, poetry, and film. California began as a literary invention, a magic island, in a Spanish romance before conquistadors first visited the land. From early days to the present, the California dream of happiness in a land of new beginnings has been maintained by suppression of disturbing realities: above all, the destruction of native peoples; and by events and facts such as the tragedy of the Donner Party, the persistence of poverty and crime in the golden land, disturbing crimes such as the Black Dahlia; and pandemics and ecological disaster. This book explores a rich Gothic tradition that exposes the repressed past and imagines the fates awaiting a failed California.

This book offers an exploration of key sociological themes and debates via film and literature. Film and literature (fiction, not fiction and poetry) capture and reflect long-term social processes, document social transformation and change and, as such, offer sociologists and researchers an alternative data source when exploring the social world – a data source which does not often feature in sociological research or in the sociology curriculum. Literature can be used to challenge us to think sociologically via 'real-world' application. The sociological imagination can be stimulated by film as sociologists can 'use films as a lens for exploring the complexities of social class, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and to propel our analysis of these inequalities in the past and in contemporary life' (Higgenbotham, 2013). Focusing on a wide range of films and texts, this book will (re-) position such forms of writing/film as referents of social change and transformation and explore the extent to which these materials can be used as an evidential base for contemporary sociological analysis. The book will include links to further reading and reflective activities for the reader to self-evaluate understanding and to begin to apply their learning.

The first chapter is an overview of the current “crisis” of literary study, brought about by downsizings following the crash of 2008 (from which literary studies never really recovered), compounded by the Covid pandemic, and rocked by the bedrock questions put to the academic study of literature by the Black Lives Matter protests. This chapter also looks at why theory matters in the present – as an introduction to modes of questioning and ways of life, which the author opposes to the English department’s understanding of literature as a series of disciplinary objects to be understood or appreciated.The second chapter is a specific exploration of the novel, the current reigning form of literature and literary study in both popular and academic contexts, and the novel’s relation to the present (of new materialism) and the past (the European history of the novel as the official form for warehousing bourgeois subjective experience). If new materialism (including anti-racist critiques) questions the world-view of bourgeois Eurocentric humanism, it also brings into question the centrality of that world view’s primary artistic form, the novel.

With the increasing role of economic uncertainty, improving the efficiency of forecasts is ever so important. This book makes suggestions on how to evaluate the key economic indicators under uncertainty. It presents the interval method to study economic indicators, which will allow us to understand the possibilities of forecasting and the irregular nature of the economy. It is shown that with the accumulation of negative phenomena in a seemingly stable situation the effect of a compressed spring may snap into action. The book outlines the uncertainty relations in the economy, the minimal uncertainty interval, the effect of an expanding uncertainty band, sensitivity thresholds, as well as the principles of systematization and forecasting of economic indicators. The book presents ways to facilitate economic development, assess the quality of a forecast, and increase the efficiency of forecasts and decision-making in conditions of uncertainty.

Late in the 8th century, under the Tang dynasty, a local magnate led a land reclamation project on the Fujian coast that is emblematic of the encounter between the Sinitic culture of the Yellow River basin in northern China and the local cultures of the south. Later accounts say the drainage canals were undercut by a jiao, a mythological dragon-like beast that was a stand-in for the crocodiles that once inhabited the south China coast. The book uses this incident to explore the interaction between the indigenous pre-Sinitic people and culture of the Fujian coast with the Sinitic immigrants who arrived in growing numbers through the 8th century and after.

Virtuous institutions, such as human rights ones, have been neglected by securitization theory’s focus on the national state apparatus as the key driver of security politics. This book challenges this assumption, showing the ways institutional human rights, deemed the most progressive of rights, have been complicit in rendering the body vulnerable. While the book principally focuses on the treatment of the veiled woman, it also considers wider cases involving torture: the ultimate removal of control over one’s body and biggest transgression of human rights’ supposed foundational commitment to bodily integrity.

The book sets out a prospectus for a new form of civilization patterned at every level to serve and sustain the biosphere. Starting with the deep philosophical flaw at the core of modernity, namely that the cosmos is devoid of ends of its own, it posits, as an alternative axis for civilization, that the cosmos indeed actively seeks its own existence, and that its self-realization is moreover internally structured via an impulse, amongst finite things, towards co-generativity. Termed ‘Dao’ in ancient China and often coded as Law in Indigenous and First Nations cultures, this innate template is here taken as a first principle for economic production in contemporary societies: basic modes of economic production must transition from antagonistic to synergistic – to a specifically biological form of synergy which involves not merely the imitation of natural systems but active collaboration with them. The fact that this first principle is so philosophically alien to the Western mind-set while yet finding strong resonances with Chinese tradition, might encourage China, as an emerging great power, to lead the world in crafting a contemporary form of civilization that is true to Dao.

Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors: A Psycho-Semiotic Analysis uses semiotics along psychoanalytic to offer a granular analysis of one of Shakespeare’s funniest and most interesting comedies. It is distinctive in that it offers a discussion of the basic techniques found incomic literature of all kinds and applies these techniques to events in the play.It also offers a discussion of the basic theories of humor and a syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis of the play.

Shots to the Heart explores how the work of the film actor inspires, provokes, and refigures our feelings and thoughts about the cinema. The book closely considers the art of film performance, the combined effect of actors’ gestures, movements, and expressions, in relation to the viewer’s sensitive and creative eye. As discrete moments of performative incarnation on-screen slowly accumulate, actors also become figures of meaning. For many viewers, the screen figures which result from performance are simply called “characters.” But in thinking about cinema, the words “character” and “characterization” signal post-experiential abstractions: when we quickly identify characters or summarize characterization after seeing a movie, we are leaping over the emotions felt through our loving attention to the bodies flitting through a film. Such concepts can never replace a careful regard for what actors on-screen are actually doing, moment-by-moment, gesture-by-gesture. Shots to the Heart is finally not too concerned with the narrative machinations within which these gestures are inscribed, and even resists the attempt to assemble these descriptions of performance into a “full” account of the film as a whole. What Shots to the Heart does is let little moments of performance live on, in writing, as they are strung together alongside performative fragments from other films, in a kind of alternative, cinephilic account of what was felt as actors moved on the screen before us.

On Becoming Reasonable explores the contributions that 18th Century Scottish philosophers Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, and David Hume make to our understanding of important factors in the development of children as they gradually acquire central features of reasonableness. Smith and Reid explicitly discuss the importance of sentiment and reason in the development of children. Their views are favorably influenced by the writings of their English predecessor Joseph Butler. Hume, too, valued much of Butler’s thinking. But, unlike Smith and Reid, he said little about Butler’s specific reflections on sentiment and reason. Despite this, one of the aims of this little book is to show that each contributes to our understanding today of what the encouragement of the philosophical thinking of children can play in helping them to come to an appreciation of reasonableness. Although his earlier book, Reasonable Children (University Press of Kansas, 1996), made some use of Thomas Reid’s writings on practical ethics, He had yet to become acquainted with Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), whose several editions were composed at the same time he was writing his more celebrated Wealth of Nations. Reading TMS has led him in this book to compare and contrast Smith’s views with those of his good friend David Hume and Hume’s notable critic, Reid. These further reflections have resulted in a revisiting of several major concerns of Reasonable Children.His special focus is on their views about the moral development of children. He regards each of the three, in their differing but sometimes complementary ways, as welcoming the sorts of refinements of reason and sentiments that play a fundamental role in the moral development of children. He concludes that each can be regarded as supporting the general view that the moral development of children can fairly be characterized in terms of the degree to which they are becoming reasonable persons. This, he argues, fits in well with the more recent work of philosophers such as Matthew Lipman, Ann Margaret Sharp, and Gareth Matthews who began urging in the late 20th Century that the philosophical thinking of children should be encouraged.

What does it mean to study culture – and what does culture finally mean? Whether we compare cultures or delve deeply into the dynamics of a single social order, anthropology’s task is to confront the interplay of the human condition and the cultural form. Tracing the genealogy of our touchstone method, ethnography, and investigating its relation to alternative disciplines that try to get at the heart of the human experience – philology, history, and social relations – this volume considers whether contemporary anthropology might, at last, be able to define culture, after more than a century of investigation.