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MedicineOctober 2024‘Everyday health’, embodiment, and selfhood since 1950
by Tracey Loughran, Hannah Froom, Kate Mahoney, Daisy Payling
What is the history of 'everyday health' in the postwar world, and where might we find it? This volume moves away from top-down histories of health and medicine that focus on states, medical professionals, and other experts. Instead, it centres the day-to-day lives of people in diverse contexts from 1950 to the present. Chapters explore how gender, class, 'race', sexuality, disability, and age mediated experiences of health and wellbeing in historical context. The volume foregrounds methodologies for writing bottom-up histories of health, subjectivity, and embodiment, offering insights applicable to scholars of times and places beyond those represented in the case studies presented here. Drawing together cutting-edge scholarship, the volume establishes and critically interrogates 'everyday health' as a crucial concept that will shape future histories of health and medicine.
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AnthropologyMarch 2017Ageing selves and everyday life in the north of England
Years in the making
by Series edited by Alexander Smith, Cathrine Degnen
Seeking to explore what it means to grow older in contemporary Britain from the perspective of older people themselves, this richly detailed ethnographic study engages in debates over selfhood and people's relationships with time. Based on research conducted in a former coal mining village in South Yorkshire, England, Cathrine Degnen explores how the category of 'old age' comes to be assigned and experienced in everyday life through multiple registers of interaction, including that of social memory, in a postindustrial context of great social transformation. Degnen argues that the complex interplay of social, cultural and physical attributes of ageing means that older people can come to have a different position in relation to time and to the self than younger people, unseating normative conventions about narrative and temporality.
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AnthropologyJanuary 2014Ageing selves and everyday life in the north of England
Years in the making
by Cathrine Degnen
Seeking to explore what it means to grow older in contemporary Britain from the perspective of older people themselves, this richly detailed ethnographic study engages in debates over selfhood and people's relationships with time. Based on research conducted in a former coal mining village in South Yorkshire, England, Cathrine Degnen explores how the category of 'old age' comes to be assigned and experienced in everyday life through multiple registers of interaction, including that of social memory, in a postindustrial context of great social transformation. Challenging both the notion of a homogenous relationship with time across generations and the idea of a universalised middle-aged self, Degnen argues that the complex interplay of social, cultural and physical attributes of ageing means that older people can come to have a different position in relation to time and to the self than younger people, unseating normative conventions about narrative and temporality.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2024How to be multiple
The philosophy of twins
by Helena de Bres, Julia de Bres
In How to be multiple, Helena de Bres - a twin herself - argues that twinhood is a unique lens for examining our place in the world and how we relate to other people. The way we think about twins offers remarkable insights into some of the deepest questions of our existence, from what is a person? to how should we treat one another? Deftly weaving together literary and cultural history, philosophical enquiry and personal experience, de Bres examines such thorny issues as binary thinking, objectification, romantic love and friendship, revealing the limits of our individualistic perspectives. In this illuminating, entertaining book, wittily illustrated by her twin sister, de Bres ultimately suggests that to consider twinhood is to imagine the possibility of a more interconnected, capacious human future.
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December 2021Queering Chinese Kinship
Queer Public Culture in Globalizing China
by Lin Song
What does it mean to be queer in a Confucian society in which kinship roles, ties, and ideologies are of such great importance? This book makes sense of queer cultures in China—a country with one of the largest queer populations in the world—and offers an alternative to Euro-American blueprints of queer individual identity. This book contends that kinship relations must be understood as central to any expression of queer selfhood and culture in contemporary cultural production in China. Using a critical approach—“queering Chinese kinship”—Lin Song scrutinizes the relationship between queerness and family relations, and questions Eurocentric queer culture’s frequent assumption of the separation of queerness from blood family. Offering five case studies of queer representations across a range of media genres, this book also challenges the tendency in current scholarship on Chinese and East Asian queerness to understand queer cultures as predominantly counter-mainstream, marginal, and underground. Shedding light on the representations of queerness and kinship in independent and subcultural as well as commercial and popular cultural products, the book presents a more comprehensive picture of queerness and kinship in flux and highlights queer politics as an integral part of contemporary Chinese public culture.
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November 2021Intersubjective Existence
A Critical Reflection on the Theory and the Practice of Selfhood
by Oliva Blanchette
Intersubjective Existence, as the author notes, aims, first, to develop a wisdom about human life that takes the form of a theory of selfhood and, second, to reflect on what is called for in the ethical practice of human existence. Secondly, the ethical implications of this theory of selfhood are explored, specifically looking at conscience, prudential reasoning, justice, friendship, the law, temperance, courage, and concluding with a brief treatment of religion. Olivia Blanchette charts the path of his inquiry through an analysis of reflective self-consciousness in selves communing with one another. They are constituted in their substance as a union of body and soul, with intelligence and free will that give rise to cultures in communion with other selves. These cultures are over and above what is given to each self in sense consciousness and in sense appetites and which each one contends with in the exercise of selfhood and the rights that go with that in keeping with justice. Concern for right reasoning and justice leads to an analysis of temperance and courage. The chief arguments take the form of phenomenological reflections on the building blocks of the perennial philosophy. Blanchette recasts Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics from the perspective of a phenomenology of the mutual recognition of agents and the historical consciousness to which it gives rise.
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PoetryMay 2023Oldman's River
by Sid Marty
Sid Marty is a voice to be reckoned with. Beloved for his intimate, lyrical poetry, Marty’s depiction of selfhood, connection to place and to landscape have proven him a unique and dissenting voice in Canadian literature as well as a consistent presence in the Canadian environmental movement. These are poems, often strongly resonant of western speech, that celebrate all the vicissitudes of rural life, the loves and losses, the valleys and peaks of life on the prairies, foothills and in the mountains of Alberta and British Columbia. This first-ever collected works brings together old and new poems, published and unpublished works, in a celebration of the career and artistry of a Western Canadian icon.
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July 2023Autistic Masking
Understanding Identity Management and the Role of Stigma
by Amy Pearson and Kieran Rose
Masking is a form of identity management involving consciously or unconsciously suppressing aspects of identity and action. Often seen in socially marginalised groups, it is found to contribute towards poorer outcomes for autistic people, and is related to higher prevalence of suicidality, exhaustion and burnout, and mental health difficulties. Autistic Masking offers a holistic understanding of the most up-to-date evidence in this field, with the aim of developing solid knowledge and practice in health, education and society.Written to be accessible to everyday readers with an interest in autism as well as academics and professionals, the book deconstructs the predominant misconception that masking is purely a social strategy to ‘blend in’ with neurotypical (non-autistic) people. The authors consider the social context that facilitates impression management, including an individual’s response to stigma or trauma, and take an intersectional approach to exploring how autistic identity may interact with other aspects of selfhood.
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Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writersSuch a Rare Thing
The Art of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio
by Clarence Lindsay (author)
An important contribution to the field of American literary studies“Groundbreaking work in Anderson scholarship in particular and, on the wider scene, in American literary studies.” —Robert Dunne, author of A New Book of the Grotesques: Contemporary Approaches to Sherwood Anderson’s Early FictionThis critical study of Sherwood Anderson’s most famous and perhaps most widely taught work, Winesburg, Ohio, treats it as a thoroughly modernist novel examining the aesthetic nature of romantic identity.Author Clarence Lindsay argues that Anderson’s famous theory of the Grotesque is a theory of American identity. Each of the small town’s grotesques in effect authors a romantic narrative that privileges the self. In trying to live their lives by that narrative, each enacts a romantic selfhood. Each of these romantic selfhoods is an aesthetic enterprise, complicated by all the aesthetic issues relating to artist and audience. Every crisis in the novel is an aesthetic crisis; every comedy, every tragedy is an aesthetic misstep of some sort. Lindsay proposes that all moral issues in Winesburg, Ohio are aesthetic; all aesthetic issues are moral. Winesburg’s narrator’s careful attention to characters’ romantic narratives of self provides an ironic scrutiny of not only the astonishing varieties of American romantic identity but also a painstaking interrogation of a variety of romantic discourses. Anderson’s radical formal innovation, the interrelated tale, was the perfect American form, not only allowing for the narrator’s “democracy of fascination” with the grotesques’ absolutely equal competing singularities but also providing for the comic juxtaposition of these claims on uniqueness, a jostling that subverts the traditional novel’s emphasis on the singular individual.This first sustained critical analysis of this American classic restores Anderson to the top rank of American artists, placing him alongside other intense scrutinizers of American romanticism: Hawthorne, Melville, and Hemingway.
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December 2021Asylum Ways of Seeing
Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture
by Heather Murray
Asylum Ways of Seeing is a cultural and intellectual history of people with mental illnesses in the twentieth-century United States. While acknowledging the fraught, and often violent, histories of American psychiatric hospitals, Heather Murray also suggests that it is in these hospitals that patients became more intense observers: they gave more conscious consideration to institutional and broader kinds of citizenship, to the nature and needs of communities versus those of individuals, to scientific modernity, and to human rights and solidarities among the suffering. All of these ideas have animated twentieth-century America, and, as Murray shows, have not just flowed into psychiatric hospitals but outward from them as well. These themes are especially clear within patients' intimate, creative, and political correspondence, writings, and drawings, as well as in hospital publications and films. This way of thinking and imagining contrasts with more common images of the patient—as passive, resigned, and absented from the world in the cloistered setting of the hospital—that have animated psychiatry over the course of the twentieth century. Asylum Ways of Seeing traces how it is that patient resignation went from being interpreted as wisdom in the early twentieth century, to being understood as a capitulation in scientific and political sources by mid-century, to being seen as a profound violation of selfhood and individual rights by the century's end. In so doing, it makes a call to reconsider the philosophical possibilities within resignation.
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EducationDigital Difference
Perspectives on Online Learning
by Land, R.
A sense of disquietude seems ever present when discussing new digital practices. The transformations incurred through these can be profound, troublesome in nature and far-reaching. Moral panics remain readily available. Discussing the manner in which digital culture within education might differ from its ‘analogue’ predecessors incurs the risk of resorting to increasingly roadworn metaphors of new frontiers, ‘cyber’ domains, inter-generational conflicts and, inevitably, the futurist utopias and dystopias characterised by Western media throughout the twentieth century. These imaginings now seem to belong to an earlier era of internet thinking. We are freer, over two decades on, to re-evaluate digital difference from new perspectives. Are digital learning environments now orthodox, or do the rapidly emerging technologies hold a new promise and a new arena of difference for pedagogical practice? What are the points of rift, and the points of continuity, between virtual learning spaces and their equivalents in the real? What qualities of difference should concern us now? The writings in this collection from three continents reflect a complex embrace of culture, power and technology. Topics range from social questions of consumption, speed, uncertainty, and risk to individual issues of identity, selfhood and desire. Ethical issues arise, involving equity and authority, as well as structural questions of order and ambiguity. From these themes emerges an engaging agenda for future educational research and practice in higher education over the coming decade. The book will interest teachers, practitioners and managers from all disciplines, as well as educational researchers.
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Humanities & Social SciencesSEEING OURSELVES
Reclaiming Humanity from God and Science
by Raymond Tallis
In Seeing Ourselves, philosopher and neuroscientist Raymond Tallis brings together the preoccupations of some fifty years of writing and thinking about the overwhelming mystery of ordinary human life, and goes in search of what kind of beings we are, and where we might find meaning in our lives. If, asks Tallis, we reject the supernatural belief that we are pure spirits temporarily lodged in bodies, handmade by God, and uniquely related to Him, what should we put in its place? How do we ensure, if we accept the death of God, that something within us does not also die? And if we are simply organisms shaped by the forces of evolution, with no reason to exist and with no objective value, as some scientists claim, where shall we find meaning sufficiently enduring and profound to withstand the knowledge of our own mortality and the certain loss of all that we love or value? How should we think of ourselves if we are neither fallen angels trying to enact the will of God, nor unrisen apes acting out a biological prescription? Tallis begins his quest by establishing what it is we know of our fundamental nature. Showcasing a remarkable detailed engagement with a huge range of disciplines, he examines our relationship to our own bodies, to time, our selfhood and our agency – all manifestations of the unique nature of human consciousness – and shows why human beings are like nothing else in the universe. Having revealed our nature in all its glory, Tallis then addresses what is unresolved in the human condition – our hunger for a coherent life, inwardly lit by a single sense of purpose and meaning – and the search for something that matches the profundity of religion, even to the point of accommodating the tragedy of our lives. He shows that it is the actuality of human transcendence and the needs it awakens that must be the bridge across the divide between believers and non-believers. The book is ultimately a celebration. Behind the philosophical arguments is a hunger for more wakefulness inspired by a feeling of wonder and gratitude for the mystery of the most commonplace manifestations of our humanity. Tallis’s endeavour in Seeing Ourselves is to turn up the wattage of the light in which we see our everyday world and to think more clearly about who we are. It is only when we have woken from religion and naturalism, that we will find ourselves at the threshold of an unfettered inquiry – into ourselves, the world we have built and the universe into which we have built it – and then there may be some hope for salvation.
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November 2020The Buddhist Self
On Tathāgatagarbha and Ātman
by C. V. Jones
The assertion that there is nothing in the constitution of any person that deserves to be considered the self (ātman)—a permanent, unchanging kernel of personal identity in this life and those to come—has been a cornerstone of Buddhist teaching from its inception. Whereas other Indian religious systems celebrated the search for and potential discovery of one’s “true self,” Buddhism taught about the futility of searching for anything in our experience that is not transient and ephemeral. But a small yet influential set of Mahāyāna Buddhist texts, composed in India in the early centuries CE, taught that all sentient beings possess at all times, and across their successive lives, the enduring and superlatively precious nature of a Buddha. This was taught with reference to the enigmatic expression tathāgatagarbha—the “womb” or “chamber” for a Buddha—which some texts refer to as a person’s true self. The Buddhist Self is a methodical examination of Indian teaching about the tathāgatagarbha (otherwise the presence of one’s “Buddha-nature”) and the extent to which different Buddhist texts and authors articulated this in terms of the self. C. V. Jones attends to each of the Indian Buddhist works responsible for explaining what is meant by the expression tathāgatagarbha, and how far this should be understood or promoted using the language of selfhood. With close attention to these sources, Jones argues that the trajectory of Buddha-nature thought in India is also the history and legacy of a Buddhist account of what deserves to be called the self: an innovative attempt to equip Mahāyāna Buddhism with an affirmative response to wider Indian interest in the discovery of something precious or even divine in one’s own constitution. This argument is supplemented by critical consideration of other themes that run through this distinctive body of Mahāyānist literature: the relationship between Buddhist and non-Buddhist teachings about the self, the overlap between the tathāgatagarbha and the nature of the mind, and the originally radical position that the only means of becoming liberated from rebirth is to achieve the same exalted status as the Buddha.
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The Poet's Novel
by Murathan Mungan
The Poet's Novel is set in an imaginary world without high technology, and where its human dwellers maintain a strong connection with nature. Here poets and philosophers are revered deeply, and poems embellish city walls instead of flags; it is a world where words are sacred and dreams magical. We navigate this terrain through three main characters: Bendag, a legendary poet who has been on voluntary exile for fifty years; Moottah, a reclusive philosopher who has not left his home for more than twenty years; and Gamenn, an intelligent detective who has undertaken to investigate the poet murders that have been shaking the Mainland for a while. When each of these characters embark on their own quests, their seemingly divergent paths converge and their stories merge, creating a whole that is both powerful and deeply moving.
