Download or read book The Punitive Imagination written by Austin Sarat and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a thought-provoking collection of five essays that explore the purposes and meanings of legal punishment in the United States, both culturally and socially From the Gospel of Matthew to numerous US Supreme Court justices, many literary and legal sources have observed that how a society metes out punishment reveals core truths about its character. The Punitive Imagination is a collection of essays that engages and contributes to debates about the purposes and meanings of punishment in the United States. The Punitive Imagination examines some of the critical assumptions that frame America's approach to punishment. It explores questions such as: · What is the place of concern for human dignity in our prevailing ideologies of punishment? · Can we justly punish the socially disadvantaged? · What assumptions about persons, social institutions, and the ordering of social space provide the basis for American punitiveness? · Who, if anyone, can be held responsible for excessively punitive criminal sentences? · How does punishment depend on prevailing views of free will, responsibility, desert, blameworthiness? · Where/how are those views subject to challenge in our punitive practices? As Sarat posits in his introduction, the way a society punishes demonstrates its commitment to standards of judgment and justice, its distinctive views of blame and responsibility, its understandings of mercy and forgiveness, and its particular ways of responding to evil. He goes on to discuss the history of punishment in the United States and what it reveals about assumptions made about persons that “undergird” the American system of punishment. The five additional contributors to The Punitive Imagination seek to illuminate what American practices of punishment tell us about who we are as a nation. Synthesizing cultural, sociological, philosophical, and legal perspectives, they offer a distinctive take on the meaning of punishment in America.
Download or read book The Punitive Turn written by Deborah E. McDowell and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Punitive Turn explores the historical, political, economic, and sociocultural roots of mass incarceration, as well as its collateral costs and consequences. Giving significant attention to the exacting toll that incarceration takes on inmates, their families, their communities, and society at large, the volume’s contributors investigate the causes of the unbridled expansion of incarceration in the United States. Experts from multiple scholarly disciplines offer fresh research on race and inequality in the criminal justice system and the effects of mass incarceration on minority groups' economic situation and political inclusion. In addition, practitioners and activists from the Sentencing Project, the Virginia Organizing Project, and the Restorative Community Foundation, among others, discuss race and imprisonment from the perspective of those working directly in the field. Employing a multidisciplinary approach, the essays included in the volume provide an unprecedented range of perspectives on the growth and racial dimensions of incarceration in the United States and generate critical questions not simply about the penal system but also about the inner workings, failings, and future of American democracy. Contributors: Ethan Blue (University of Western Australia) * Mary Ellen Curtin (American University) * Harold Folley (Virginia Organizing Project) * Eddie Harris (Children Youth and Family Services) * Anna R. Haskins (University of Wisconsin–Madison) * Cheryl D. Hicks (University of North Carolina at Charlotte) * Charles E. Lewis Jr. (Congressional Research Institute for Social Work and Policy) * Marc Mauer (The Sentencing Project) * Anoop Mirpuri (Portland State University) * Christopher Muller (Harvard University) * Marlon B. Ross (University of Virginia) * Jim Shea (Community Organizer) * Jonathan Simon (University of California–Berkeley) * Heather Ann Thompson (Temple University) * Debbie Walker (The Female Perspective) * Christopher Wildeman (Yale University) * Interviews by Jared Brown (University of Virginia) & Tshepo Morongwa Chéry (University of Texas–Austin)
Download or read book Futurism and the African Imagination written by Dike Okoro and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-31 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates how African authors and artists have explored themes of the future and technology within their works. Afrofuturism was coined in the 1990s as a means of exploring the intersection of African diaspora culture with technology, science and science fiction. However, this book argues that literature and other arts within Africa have always reflected on themes of futurism, across diverse forms of speculative writing (including science fiction), images, spirituality, myth, magical realism, the supernatural, performance and other forms of oral resources. This book reflects on themes of African futurism across a range of literary and artistic works, also investigating how problems such as racism, sexism, social injustice and postcolonialism are reflected in these narratives. Chapters cover authors, artists, movements and performers such Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Elechi Amadi, Mazisi Kunene, Nnedi Okorafor, Lauren Beukes, Leslie Nneka Arimah and the New African Movement. The book also includes a range of original interviews with prominent authors and artists, including Tanure Ojaide, Lauren Beukes, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Benjamin Kwakye, Ntongela Masilela and Bruce Onobrakpeya. Interdisciplinary in its approach, this book will be an important resource for researchers across the fields of African literature, philosophy, culture and politics.
Download or read book Amos and the Cosmic Imagination written by James R. Linville and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-30 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Said to contain the words of the earliest of the biblical prophets (8th century BCE), the book of Amos is reinterpreted by the author in light of new and sometimes controversial historical approaches to the Bible. Amos is read as the literary product of the Persian-era community in Judah. Its representations of divine-human communication are investigated in the context of the ancient writers' own role as transmitters and shapers of religious traditions. Amos's extraordinary poetry expresses mythical conceptions of divine manifestation and a process of destruction and recreation of the cosmos which reveals that behind the appearances of the natural world is a heavenly, cosmic temple.
Download or read book C Wright Mills and the Criminological Imagination written by Jon Frauley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In spite of its widespread use within criminology, the term ’criminological imagination’, as derived from C. Wright Mills’ classic The Sociological Imagination, has yet to be fully developed and clarified as an analytic concept capable of guiding theorizing or empirical enquiry. This volume, with a preface by Elliot Currie, engages with and reflects on this concept, exploring C. Wright Mills’ work for criminological enquiry. Bringing together the latest work of leading scholars in the fields of criminology and sociology from around the world, C. Wright Mills and the Criminological Imagination investigates the emergence and lineage of a criminological concept indebted to Mills’ thought, adapting and applying it to a specifically criminological context. With attention to theoretical concerns and, as well as the application of the criminological imagination in concrete empirical research, this volume sheds new light on the methodological and analytical aspects of the criminological imagination as a multifaceted concept and explores the possibilities that it offers for the emergence of an imaginative criminological practice. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in sociology and social theory, criminology, criminal justice studies, law and research methods.
Download or read book Smallpox and the Literary Imagination 1660 1820 written by David Shuttleton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-05-17 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Smallpox was a much feared disease until modern times, responsible for many deaths worldwide and reaching epidemic proportions amongst the British population in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is the first substantial critical study of the literary representation of the disease and its victims between the Restoration and the development of inoculation against smallpox around 1800. David Shuttleton draws upon a wide range of canonical texts including works by Dryden, Johnson, Steele, Goldsmith and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the latter having experimented with vaccination against smallpox. He reads these texts alongside medical treatises and the rare, but moving writings of smallpox survivors, showing how medical and imaginative writers developed a shared tradition of figurative tropes, myths and metaphors. This fascinating study uncovers the cultural impact of smallpox, and the different ways writers found to come to terms with the terror of disease and death.
Download or read book Questioning Punishment written by Henrique Carvalho and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-10-06 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book questions punishment as concept, social phenomenon and contemporary practice. It unpacks punishment’s nature and the assumptions that underpin it, examines its targets, objectives and implications, locates punishment and punitivity within their social contexts, and aims to unsettle the idea that there is something common-sensical, necessary and unavoidable about punitive justice. Questioning Punishment develops its argument through an innovative structure organised around five central questions: what punishment is; who punishment’s targets and subjects are; how punishment is perpetuated and experienced; when and where punishment unfolds and why we punish. It ends by considering the implications of this enquiry to understandings of punishment and broader pursuits of justice. It is essential reading for all those engaged with the sociology of punishment and prisons, criminal justice, and theoretical criminology.
Download or read book Expanding the Criminological Imagination written by Alana Barton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together a series of writings on the problems facing contemporary criminology, highlighting the main theoretical priorities of critical analysis and their application to substantive case studies of research in action. Its main aim is to establish the conceptual and practical foundations for a new generation of studies in criminology, and to set a new agenda for critical criminology. Each chapter will critically assess the main conceptual and empirical problems they have encountered in their research, and to bring to life the key theoretical debates within the discipline. This book will be essential reading for students seeking an understanding of the nature of the discipline of criminology and criminological research.
Download or read book States of Imagination written by Thomas Blom Hansen and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2001-12-12 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The state has recently been rediscovered as an object of inquiry by a broad range of scholars. Reflecting the new vitality of the field of political anthropology, States of Imagination draws together the best of this recent critical thinking to explore the postcolonial state. Contributors focus on a variety of locations from Guatemala, Pakistan, and Peru to India and Ecuador; they study what the state looks like to those seeing it from the vantage points of rural schools, police departments, small villages, and the inside of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Focusing on the micropolitics of everyday state-making, the contributors examine the mythologies, paradoxes, and inconsistencies of the state through ethnographies of diverse postcolonial practices. They show how the authority of the state is constantly challenged from the local as well as the global and how growing demands to confer rights and recognition to ever more citizens, organizations, and institutions reveal a persistent myth of the state as a source of social order and an embodiment of popular sovereignty. Demonstrating the indispensable value of ethnographic work on the practices and the symbols of the state, States of Imagination showcases a range of studies and methods to provide insight into the diverse forms of the postcolonial state as an arena of both political and cultural struggle. This collection will interest students and scholars of anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, political science, and history. Contributors. Lars Buur, Mitchell Dean, Akhil Gupta, Thomas Blom Hansen, Steffen Jensen, Aletta J. Norval, David Nugent, Sarah Radcliffe, Rachel Sieder, Finn Stepputat, Martijn van Beek, Oskar Verkaaik, Fiona Wilson
Download or read book Margaret Laurence s Epic Imagination written by Paul Comeau and published by University of Alberta. This book was released on 2005-12-23 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although at times painfully insecure about her creative ability and achievement, Margaret Laurence nevertheless remained fiercely loyal to her artistic vision, an archetypal vision of loss, exile and redemption that sought comprehensive expression in the epic mode that shapes the Bible, Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, and ultimately the Manawaka world of Hagar Shipley, Rachel Cameron, Stacey MacAindra, and Morag Gunn. Paul Comeau traces the development of Margaret Laurence's epic voice from its tentative beginnings in her African fiction to its culmination in the epic Manawaka Cycle, a Dantesque journey through an infernal state of self-destructive pride, out of a purgatorial paralysis of self-doubt, and on to a kind of paradisal fulfillment in self-knowledge. Laurence discovered in epic a fitting mode at once to requite her debt to the ancestors and to break free of their influence to portray the world through the sight of her own eyes. In so doing, she became the enduring epic voice of a country and a generation.
Download or read book Hell Hath No Fury written by Meghan R. Henning and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major book to examine ancient Christian literature on hell through the lenses of gender and disability studies Throughout the Christian tradition, descriptions of hell’s fiery torments have shaped contemporary notions of the afterlife, divine justice, and physical suffering. But rarely do we consider the roots of such conceptions, which originate in a group of understudied ancient texts: the early Christian apocalypses. In this pioneering study, Meghan Henning illuminates how the bodies that populate hell in early Christian literature—largely those of women, enslaved persons, and individuals with disabilities—are punished after death in spaces that mirror real carceral spaces, effectually criminalizing those bodies on earth. Contextualizing the apocalypses alongside ancient medical texts, inscriptions, philosophy, and patristic writings, this book demonstrates the ways that Christian depictions of hell intensified and preserved ancient notions of gender and bodily normativity that continue to inform Christian identity.
Download or read book Executing Freedom written by Daniel LaChance and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-02-09 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the mid-1990s, as public trust in big government was near an all-time low, 80% of Americans told Gallup that they supported the death penalty. Why did people who didn’t trust government to regulate the economy or provide daily services nonetheless believe that it should have the power to put its citizens to death? That question is at the heart of Executing Freedom, a powerful, wide-ranging examination of the place of the death penalty in American culture and how it has changed over the years. Drawing on an array of sources, including congressional hearings and campaign speeches, true crime classics like In Cold Blood, and films like Dead Man Walking, Daniel LaChance shows how attitudes toward the death penalty have reflected broader shifts in Americans’ thinking about the relationship between the individual and the state. Emerging from the height of 1970s disillusion, the simplicity and moral power of the death penalty became a potent symbol for many Americans of what government could do—and LaChance argues, fascinatingly, that it’s the very failure of capital punishment to live up to that mythology that could prove its eventual undoing in the United States.
Download or read book Meth Wars written by Travis Linnemann and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-08-28 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the War on Drugs is maintained through racism,authority and public opinion. From the hit television series Breaking Bad, to daily news reports, anti-drug advertising campaigns and highly publicized world-wide hunts for “narcoterrorists” such as Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the drug, methamphetamine occupies a unique and important space in the public’s imagination. In Meth Wars, Travis Linnemann situates the "meth epidemic" within the broader culture and politics of drug control and mass incarceration. Linnemann draws together a range of examples and critical interdisciplinary scholarship to show how methamphetamine, and the drug war more generally, are part of a larger governing strategy that animates the politics of fear and insecurity and links seemingly unrelated concerns such as environmental dangers, the politics of immigration and national security, policing tactics, and terrorism. The author’s unique analysis presents a compelling case for how the supposed “meth epidemic” allows politicians, small town police and government counter-narcotics agents to engage in a singular policing project in service to the broader economic and geostrategic interests of the United States.
Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism written by Jacqueline Z. Wilson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-05-17 with total page 1038 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This extensive Handbook addresses a range of contemporary issues related to Prison Tourism across the world. It is divided into seven sections: Ethics, Human Rights and Penal Spectatorship; Carceral Retasking, Curation and Commodification of Punishment; Meanings of Prison Life and Representations of Punishment in Tourism Sites; Death and Torture in Prison Museums; Colonialism, Relics of Empire and Prison Museums; Tourism and Operational Prisons; and Visitor Consumption and Experiences of Prison Tourism. The Handbook explores global debates within the field of Prison Tourism inquiry; spanning a diverse range of topics from political imprisonment and persecution in Taiwan to interpretive programming in Alcatraz, and the representation of incarcerated Indigenous peoples to prison graffiti. This Handbook is the first to present a thorough examination of Prison Tourism that is truly global in scope. With contributions from both well-renowned scholars and up-and-coming researchers in the field, from a wide variety of disciplines, the Handbook comprises an international collection at the cutting edge of Prison Tourism studies. Students and teachers from disciplines ranging from Criminology to Cultural Studies will find the text invaluable as the definitive work in the field of Prison Tourism.
Download or read book Laboratories of Virtue written by Michael Meranze and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Meranze uses Philadelphia as a case study to analyze the relationship between penal reform and liberalism in early America. In Laboratories of Virtue, he interprets the evolving system of criminal punishment as a microcosm of social tensions that characterized the early American republic. Engaging recent work on the history of punishment in England and continental Europe, Meranze traces criminal punishment from the late colonial system of publicly inflicted corporal penalties to the establishment of penitentiaries in the Jacksonian period. Throughout, he reveals a world of class difference and contested values in which those who did not fit the emerging bourgeois ethos were disciplined and eventually segregated. By focusing attention on the system of public penal labor that developed in the 1780s, Meranze effectively links penal reform to the development of republican principles in the Revolutionary era. His study, richly informed by Foucaultian and Freudian theory, departs from recent scholarship that treats penal reform as a nostalgic effort to reestablish social stability. Instead, Meranze interprets the reform of punishment as a forward-looking project. He argues that the new disciplinary practices arose from the reformers' struggle to contain or eliminate contradictions to their vision of an enlightened, liberal republic.
Download or read book Imagining the Post Apartheid State written by John T. Friedman and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In northwest Namibia, people’s political imagination offers a powerful insight into the post-apartheid state. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork, this book focuses on the former South African apartheid regime and the present democratic government; it compares the perceptions and practices of state and customary forms of judicial administration, reflects upon the historical trajectory of a chieftaincy dispute in relation to the rooting of state power and examines everyday forms of belonging in the independent Namibian State. By elucidating the State through a focus on the social, historical and cultural processes that help constitute it, this study helps chart new territory for anthropology, and it contributes an ethnographic perspective to a wider set of interdisciplinary debates on the State and state processes.
Download or read book Visual Aggression written by Assaf Pinkus and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2021-02-04 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why does a society seek out images of violence? What can the consumption of violent imagery teach us about the history of violence and the ways in which it has been represented and understood? Assaf Pinkus considers these questions within the context of what he calls galleries of violence, the torment imagery that flourished in German-speaking regions during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Exploring these images and the visceral bodily responses that they produced in their viewers, Pinkus argues that the new visual discourse on violence was a watershed in premodern conceptualizations of selfhood. Images of martyrdom in late medieval Germany reveal a strikingly brutal parade of passion: severed heads, split skulls, mutilated organs, extracted fingernails and teeth, and myriad other torments. Stripped from their devotional context and presented simply as brutal acts, these portrayals assailed viewers’ bodies and minds so violently that they amounted to what Pinkus describes as “visual aggressions.” Addressing contemporary discourses on violence and cruelty, the aesthetics of violence, and the eroticism of the tortured body, Pinkus ties these galleries of violence to larger cultural concerns about the ethics of violence and bodily integrity in the conceptualization of early modern personhood. Innovative and convincing, this study heralds a fundamental shift in the scholarly conversation about premodern violence, moving from a focus on the imitatio Christi and the liturgy of punishment to the notion of violence as a moral problem in an ethical system. Scholars of medieval and early modern art, history, and literature will welcome and engage with Pinkus’s research for years to come.
