Download or read book Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture written by Henry Jenkins and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2009-06-05 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many teens today who use the Internet are actively involved in participatory cultures—joining online communities (Facebook, message boards, game clans), producing creative work in new forms (digital sampling, modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction), working in teams to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (as in Wikipedia), and shaping the flow of media (as in blogging or podcasting). A growing body of scholarship suggests potential benefits of these activities, including opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, development of skills useful in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship. Some argue that young people pick up these key skills and competencies on their own by interacting with popular culture; but the problems of unequal access, lack of media transparency, and the breakdown of traditional forms of socialization and professional training suggest a role for policy and pedagogical intervention. This report aims to shift the conversation about the "digital divide" from questions about access to technology to questions about access to opportunities for involvement in participatory culture and how to provide all young people with the chance to develop the cultural competencies and social skills needed. Fostering these skills, the authors argue, requires a systemic approach to media education; schools, afterschool programs, and parents all have distinctive roles to play. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning

Download or read book The Joy Luck Club written by Amy Tan and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-09-21 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The Joy Luck Club is one of my favorite books. From the moment I first started reading it, I knew it was going to be incredible. For me, it was one of those once-in-a-lifetime reading experiences that you cherish forever. It inspired me as a writer and still remains hugely inspirational.” —Kevin Kwan, author of Crazy Rich Asians Amy Tan’s beloved, New York Times bestselling tale of mothers and daughters, now the focus of a new documentary Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir on Netflix Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue. With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.

Download or read book Rhetorics Poetics and Cultures written by James A. Berlin and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2003 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures is James Berlin's most comprehensive effort to refigure the field of English Studies. Here, in his last book, Berlin both historically situates and recovers for today the tools and insights of rhetoric-displaced and marginalized, he argues, by the allegedly disinterested study of aesthetic texts in the college English department. Berlin sees rhetoric as offering a unique perspective on the current disciplinary crisis, complementing the challenging perspectives offered by postmodern literary theory and cultural studies. Taking into account the political and intellectual issues at stake and the relation of these issues to economic and social transformations, Berlin argues for a pedagogy that makes the English studies classroom the center of disciplinary activities, the point at which theory, practice, and democratic politics intersect. This new educational approach, organized around text interpretation and production-not one or the other exclusively, as before-prepares students for work, democratic politics, and consumer culture today by providing a revised conception of both reading and writing as acts of textual interpretation; it also gives students tools to critique the socially constructed, politically charged reality of classroom, college, and culture. This new edition of Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures includes JAC response essays by Linda Brodkey, Patricia Harkin, Susan Miller, John Trimbur, and Victor J. Vitanza, as well as an afterword by Janice M. Lauer. These essays situate Berlin's work in personal, pedagogical, and political contexts that highlight the continuing importance of his work for understanding contemporary disciplinary practice.

Download or read book Literature and Lives written by Allen Carey-Webb and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Telling stories from secondary and college English classrooms, this book explores the new possibilities for teaching and learning generated by bringing together reader-response and cultural-studies approaches. The book connects William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and other canonical figures to multicultural writers, popular culture, film, testimonial, politics, history, and issues relevant to contemporary youth. Each chapter contains brief explications of literary scholarship and theory, and each is followed by extensive annotated bibliographies of multicultural literature, approachable scholarship and theory, and relevant Internet sites. Each chapter also contains descriptions of classroom units and activities focusing on a particular theme, such as genocide, homelessness, race, gender, youth violence, (post)colonialism, class relations, and censorship; and discussion of ways in which students often respond to such "hot-button" topics. Chapters in the book are: (1) A Course in Contemporary World Literature; (2) Teaching about Homelessness; (3) Genderizing the Curriculum: A Personal Journey; (4) Addressing the Youth Violence Crisis; (5) Shakespeare and the New Multicultural British and World Literatures; (6) "Huckleberry Finn" and the Issue of Race in Today's Classroom; (7) Testimonial, Autoethnography, and the Future of English; and (8) Conclusion. Contains approximately 350 references. Appendixes contain an email exchange between the author and a first year, inner-city teacher; a note to teachers on the truth of Rigoberta Menchu's testimonial; a brief account of philology; a 13-item annotated bibliography of readings in literary theory for English teachers; and lists of web sites exploring literary theory and cultural studies, supporting literature teaching, and for new teachers. (NKA)

Download or read book Mla Handbook for Writers of Research Papers written by Joseph Gibaldi and published by . This book was released on 2008-06-05 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides guidelines and examples for handling research, outlining, spelling, punctuation, formatting, and documentation.

Download or read book Maps of Empire written by Kyle Wanberg and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the political upheavals of the mid-twentieth century, as imperialism was unraveling on a grand scale, writers from colonized and occupied spaces questioned the necessity and ethics of their histories. As empire "wrote back" to the self-ordained centres of the world, modes of representation underwent a transformation. Exploring novels and diverse forms of literature from regions in West Africa, the Middle East, and Indigenous America, Maps of Empire considers how writers struggle with the unstable boundaries generated by colonial projects and their dissolution. The literary spaces covered in the book form imaginary states or reimagine actual cartographies and identities sanctioned under empire. The works examined in Maps of Empire, through their inner representations and their outer histories of reception, inspire and provoke us to reconsider boundaries.

Download or read book Time Passages written by George Lipsitz and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor written by Rob Nixon and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Using the innovative concept of "slow violence" to describe these threats, Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today. Slow violence, because it is so readily ignored by a hard-charging capitalism, exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems and of people who are poor, disempowered, and often involuntarily displaced, while fueling social conflicts that arise from desperation as life-sustaining conditions erode. In a book of extraordinary scope, Nixon examines a cluster of writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South. By approaching environmental justice literature from this transnational perspective, he exposes the limitations of the national and local frames that dominate environmental writing. And by skillfully illuminating the strategies these writer-activists deploy to give dramatic visibility to environmental emergencies, Nixon invites his readers to engage with some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

Download or read book Interdisciplining Digital Humanities written by Julie Thompson Klein and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2015-01-05 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interdisciplining Digital Humanities sorts through definitions and patterns of practice over roughly sixty-five years of work, providing an overview for specialists and a general audience alike. It is the only book that tests the widespread claim that Digital Humanities is interdisciplinary. By examining the boundary work of constructing, expanding, and sustaining a new field, it depicts both the ways this new field is being situated within individual domains and dynamic cross-fertilizations that are fostering new relationships across academic boundaries. It also accounts for digital reinvigorations of “public humanities” in cultural heritage institutions of museums, archives, libraries, and community forums.

Download or read book Pentagon 9 11 written by Alfred Goldberg and published by Office of the Secretary, Historical Offi. This book was released on 2007-09-05 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most comprehensive account to date of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon and aftermath, this volume includes unprecedented details on the impact on the Pentagon building and personnel and the scope of the rescue, recovery, and caregiving effort. It features 32 pages of photographs and more than a dozen diagrams and illustrations not previously available.

Download or read book Seeking the Beloved Community written by Joy James and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected essays on radical social change.

Download or read book The Constitution of Algorithms written by Florian Jaton and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A laboratory study that investigates how algorithms come into existence. Algorithms--often associated with the terms big data, machine learning, or artificial intelligence--underlie the technologies we use every day, and disputes over the consequences, actual or potential, of new algorithms arise regularly. In this book, Florian Jaton offers a new way to study computerized methods, providing an account of where algorithms come from and how they are constituted, investigating the practical activities by which algorithms are progressively assembled rather than what they may suggest or require once they are assembled.

Download or read book Land of Hope written by Wilfred M. McClay and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For too long we’ve lacked a compact, inexpensive, authoritative, and compulsively readable book that offers American readers a clear, informative, and inspiring narrative account of their country. Such a fresh retelling of the American story is especially needed today, to shape and deepen young Americans’ sense of the land they inhabit, help them to understand its roots and share in its memories, all the while equipping them for the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship in American society The existing texts simply fail to tell that story with energy and conviction. Too often they reflect a fragmented outlook that fails to convey to American readers the grand trajectory of their own history. This state of affairs cannot continue for long without producing serious consequences. A great nation needs and deserves a great and coherent narrative, as an expression of its own self-understanding and its aspirations; and it needs to be able to convey that narrative to its young effectively. Of course, it goes without saying that such a narrative cannot be a fairy tale of the past. It will not be convincing if it is not truthful. But as Land of Hope brilliantly shows, there is no contradiction between a truthful account of the American past and an inspiring one. Readers of Land of Hope will find both in its pages.

Download or read book Financing Metropolitan Governments in Developing Countries written by Roy W. Bahl and published by Lincoln Inst of Land Policy. This book was released on 2013 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The economic activity that drives growth in developing countries is heavily concentrated in cities. Catchphrases such as “metropolitan areas are the engines that pull the national economy” turn out to be fairly accurate. But the same advantages of metropolitan areas that draw investment also draw migrants who need jobs and housing, lead to demands for better infrastructure and social services, and result in increased congestion, environmental harm, and social problems. The challenges for metropolitan public finance are to capture a share of the economic growth to adequately finance new and growing expenditures and to organize governance so that services can be delivered in a cost-effective way, giving the local population a voice in fiscal decision making. At the same time, care must be taken to avoid overregulation and overtaxation, which will hamper the now quite mobile economic engine of private investment and entrepreneurial initiative. Metropolitan planning has become a reality in most large urban areas, even though the planning agencies are often ineffective in moving things forward and in linking their plans with the fiscal and financial realities of metropolitan government. A growing number of success stories in metropolitan finance and management, together with accumulated experience and proper efforts and support, could be extended to a broader array of forward-looking programs to address the growing public service needs of metropolitan-area populations. Nevertheless, sweeping metropolitan-area fiscal reforms have been few and far between; the urban policy reform agenda is still a long one; and there is a reasonable prospect that closing the gaps between what we know how to do and what is actually being done will continue to be difficult and slow. This book identifies the most important issues in metropolitan governance and finance in developing countries, describes the practice, explores the gap between practice and what theory suggests should be done, and lays out the reform paths that might be considered. Part of the solution will rest in rethinking expenditure assignments and instruments of finance. The “right” approach also will depend on the flexibility of political leaders to relinquish some control in order to find a better solution to the metropolitan finance problem.

Download or read book Representing the other written by Bruce Horner and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intended for teachers of basic writing, this book contains a collection of new and updated essays addressing issues surrounding underprepared writers. It maps errors and expectations for basic writing and develops teaching approaches that will be effective in a social and political world. The book considers concepts such as the possibility of eliminating basic writing through "mainstreaming" or other strategies; the relevance of contact zone pedagogies to basic writing; intersections between basic writers and other writers; the continuing distinction between matters of "style" and matters of "content"; feminist and post-colonial critiques of composition work; and the prevalent textual bias of research in composition. After an introduction, essays in the book are (1) "The 'Birth' of 'Basic Writing'" (Bruce Horner); (2) "Conflict and Struggle: The Enemies or Preconditions of Basic Writing?" (Min-Zhan Lu); (3) "Importing 'Science': Neutralizing Basic Writing" (Min-Zhan Lu); (4) "Redefining the Legacy of Mina Shaughnessy: A Critique of the Politics of Linguistic Innocence" (Min-Zhan Lu); (5) "Mapping Errors and Expectations for Basic Writing: From the 'Frontier Field' to 'Border Country'" (Bruce Horner); (6) "Re-Thinking the 'Sociality' of Error: Teaching Editing as Negotiation" (Bruce Horner); and (7) "Professing Multiculturalism: The Politics of Style in the Contact Zone" (Min-Zhan Lu). An afterword ("Some Afterwords: Intersections and Divergences" by Bruce Horner) is attached. Contains approximately 400 references. (CR)

Download or read book Cultivating Music in America written by Ralph P. Locke and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Victorian cup on my shelf--a present from my mother--reads 'Love the Giver.' Is it because the very word patronage implies the authority of the father that we have treated American women patrons and activists so unlovingly in the writing of our own history? This pioneering collection of superb scholarship redresses that imbalance. At the same time it brilliantly documents the interrelationship between various aspects of gender and the creation of our own culture."--Judith Tick, author of Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer's Search for American Music "Together with the fine-grained and energetic research, I like the spirit of this book, which is ambitious, bold, and generous minded. Cultivating Music in America corrects long-standing prejudices, omissions, and misunderstandings about the role of women in setting up the structures of America's musical life, and, even more far-reaching, it sheds light on the character of American musical life itself. To read this book is to be brought to a fresh understanding of what is at stake when we discuss notions such as 'elitism, ' 'democratic taste, ' and the political and economic implications of art."--Richard Crawford, author of The American Musical Landscape "We all know we are indebted to royal patronage for the music of Mozart. But who launched American talent? The answer is women, this book teaches us. Music lovers will be grateful for these ten essays, sound in scholarship, that make a strong case for the women philanthropists who ought to join Carnegie and Rockefeller as household words as sponsors of music."--Karen J. Blair, author of The Torchbearers: Women and Their Amateur Arts Associations in America

Download or read book Urban Design Reader written by Steve Tiesdell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-02-07 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essential reading for students and practitioners of urban design, this collection of essays introduces the 6 dimensions of urban design through a range of the most important classic and contemporary key texts. Urban design as a form of place making has become an increasingly significant area of academic endeavour, of public policy and professional practice. Compiled by the authors of the best selling Public Places Urban Spaces, this indispensable guide includes all the crucial definitions and various understandings of the subject, as well as a practical look at how to implement urban design that readers will need to refer to time and time again. Uniquely, the selections of essays that include the works of Gehl, Jacobs, and Cullen, are presented substantially in their original form, and the truly accessible dip-in-and-out format will enable readers to form a deeper, practical understanding of urban design.