Résultats de recherche de titre
Articles 1 à 20 sur 454
Crossing the Border: On the Quadruple-Evidence Method
Par Li Yang, Shuxian Ye. 2024
This book is the first monograph of its kind in the academic world which comprehensively expounds the new methodology of…
humanities. The quadruple-evidence method is one which integrates quadruple-evidences to open up new horizon for interpretation of ancient culture in the three-dimensional manner. The first layer of evidence refers to documents passed down from the past; the second layer of evidence refers to local written materials; the third layer of evidence includes oral legends of anthropology and folklore and etiquette in the living folk customs; the fourth layer of evidence refers to those ancient objects and images either unearthed in archaeological excavations or handed down from the past. The book consists of theoretical explorations and their applications in individual cases. While the first part studies the academic evolution, theory and methodological value of the quadruple-evidence method, the second part, in using the method in different cases, explores different historical and cultural phenomena in the history of China, attempting to extend the frontier of the origin of civilization from the approach of mythological studyThe Routledge Handbook for Global South Studies on Subjectivities (Transdisciplinary Souths)
Par Sebastian Thies, Susanne Goumegou, Georgina Cebey. 2024
The Routledge Handbook for Global South Studies on Subjectivities provides a series of exemplary studies conjoining perspectives from Asian, African,…
and Latin American Studies on subjectivity in the Global South as a central category of social and cultural analysis. The contestation of the Northern myth of the autonomous subject—the dispositive that contests subject formation in the South by describing it as fragmented, incomplete, delayed or simply deviant, has been a cornerstone of theory production from the South over the years.This volume’s contributions offer an interdisciplinary and transarea dialogue, reframing issues of selfhood and alterity, of personhood, of the human, of the commons and contesting the North’s presumption in determining what kind of subjectivities abide by its norms, whose voices are heard, who is recognised as a subject, and, by extension, whose lives matter. In the context of the shifting dynamics of today’s manifold crises, they raise questions regarding how subjectivities act on or resist such forms of contestation, contingency, and indeterminacy.A major contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the Global South, this handbook will be an essential resource for students, scholars, researchers and instructors in literature, media and culture studies, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, law, politics, visual arts and art history.Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women
Par Ellen Atlanta. 2023
A generation defining exposé of toxic beauty culture in our digital age and how it is harming women We are…
living in a new age of beauty. With advancements in cosmetic surgery, augmented reality face filters, photo editing apps, and exposure to more images than we were ever meant to see, we have the ability to craft ourselves in whichever way we please. We pinch, pull, squeeze, tweeze, smooth and slice ourselves beyond recognition. But is modern beauty culture truly empowering? Are we really in control?In every era there is a beauty ideal. Yet, today the pressure to attain and retain the perfect body is compounded by our addiction to sharing every angle of ourselves online. In an age of influencers and social media, modern beauty culture is all-consuming and it is hurting the lives of women around the world. From Love Island to lip filler, blackfishing to the beauty tax, Ellen Atlanta reconfigures our understanding of women's relationship with beauty culture to account for the digital age. Providing an eye-opening account of the realities young women face under a dominant industry, Pixel Flesh unmasks the absurdities of the dystopia we find ourselves living in. Both a rallying cry and a refusal to suffer in silence, this is a vital insight into what it feels like to exist as a woman in a digitally obsessed world.Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women
Par Ellen Atlanta. 2023
A generation defining exposé of toxic beauty culture in our digital age and how it is harming women We are…
living in a new age of beauty. With advancements in cosmetic surgery, augmented reality face filters, photo editing apps, and exposure to more images than we were ever meant to see, we have the ability to craft ourselves in whichever way we please. We pinch, pull, squeeze, tweeze, smooth and slice ourselves beyond recognition. But is modern beauty culture truly empowering? Are we really in control?In every era there is a beauty ideal. Yet, today the pressure to attain and retain the perfect body is compounded by our addiction to sharing every angle of ourselves online. In an age of influencers and social media, modern beauty culture is all-consuming and it is hurting the lives of women around the world. From Love Island to lip filler, blackfishing to the beauty tax, Ellen Atlanta reconfigures our understanding of women's relationship with beauty culture to account for the digital age. Providing an eye-opening account of the realities young women face under a dominant industry, Pixel Flesh unmasks the absurdities of the dystopia we find ourselves living in. Both a rallying cry and a refusal to suffer in silence, this is a vital insight into what it feels like to exist as a woman in a digitally obsessed world.Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Loving and Living Alone
Par Amy Key. 2023
"[Arrangements in Blue] reflects on a life spent as a single woman and how that affects friendships, freedom, domesticity, family,…
sexuality, the psyche, the self. It observes things about being alone that I have never seen or heard articulated before.... beautiful, effortless.... I haven’t been so obsessed with a book in a long time." —Dolly Alderton “The poet Amy Key’s first book might be the most hyped memoir of 2023 (or at least a close second to Spare)… This raw, gorgeous, pulsing memoir is…the harbinger of a real talent.” —Laura Hackett, Sunday Times [UK] Amy Key—a writer “of rare and strange magic” (Guardian)—probes the art of living without romance in this soul-stirring debut. When British poet Amy Key was growing up, she envisioned a life shaped by love—and Joni Mitchell’s album Blue was her inspiration. “Blue became part of my language of intimacy,” she writes, recalling the dozens of times she played the record as a teen, “an intimacy of disclosure, vulnerability, unadorned feeling that I thought I’d eventually share with a romantic other.” As the years ticked by, she held on to this very specific idea of romance like a bottle of wine saved for a special occasion. But what happens when the romance we are all told will give life meaning never presents itself? Now single in her forties, Key explores the sweeping scales of romantic feeling as she has encountered them, using the album Blue as an expressive anchor: from the low notes of loss and unfulfilled desire—punctuated by sharp, discordant feelings of jealousy and regret—to the deep harmony of friendship, and the crescendos of sexual attraction and self-realization. Finding solace in Mitchell’s songs, Key plumbs Blue’s track list for themes that resonate with her heart’s seasons. Listening to the song “California,” she explores the mixed emotions that come with traveling alone in a world built for couples; she juxtaposes the lonely lyrics of “My Old Man” with the pleasurable art of curating a perfect apartment for one; and with the utmost tenderness, she parses out her decision to not have children with the eloquent “Little Green.” Mapping the evolution of her early conceptions of love through her adulthood, Key offers a tender and nakedly candid celebration of the many forms of intimacy that often go unnoticed. An essential work for both the single and the partnered, Arrangements in Blue is a bold manual for building a life on your own terms.Natality: Toward A Philosophy Of Birth
Par Jennifer Banks. 2023
“A gripping exploration of some of society’s biggest contradictions.… [Natality] is a fascinating read.” —Dana Suskind, MD, author of Parent…
Nation An exhilarating exploration of natality, a much-needed counterpoint to mortality, drawing on the insights of brilliant writers and thinkers. Birth is one of the most fraught and polarized issues of our time, at the center of debates on abortion, gender, work, and medicine. But birth is not solely an issue; it is a fundamental part of the human condition, and, alongside death, the most consequential event in human life. Yet it remains dramatically unexplored. Although we have long intellectual traditions of wrestling with mortality, few have ever heard of natality, the term political theorist Hannah Arendt used to describe birth’s active role in our lives. In this ambitious, revelatory book, Jennifer Banks begins with Arendt’s definition of natality as the “miracle that saves the world” to develop an expansive framework for birth’s philosophical, political, spiritual, and aesthetic significance. Banks focuses on seven renowned western thinkers—Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Sojourner Truth, Adrienne Rich, and Toni Morrison—to reveal a provocative countertradition of birth. She narrates these writers’ own experiences alongside the generative ways they contended with natality in their work. Passionately intelligent and wide-ranging, Natality invites readers to attend to birth as a challenging and life-affirming reminder of our shared humanity and our capacity for creative renewal.David Walker: The Politics of Racial Egalitarianism (Black Lives)
Par Sherrow O. Pinder. 2024
David Walker, a free (with a small f) black man, was one of the most significant African-American abolitionists of the…
nineteenth century. Born in a slave society before moving to Boston where, after the American Revolutionary War, slavery was abolished, Walker devoted his life to fighting slavery and antiblack racism. In this book, Sherrow O. Pinder brings to light Walker’s lived experience, activism, and the synchronizing of his Christian principles and reformist radicalism to demonstrate why and how slavery must be eliminated. Walker’s call for blacks to regain their natural rights culminated in his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, an enormously influential work that is now considered a founding text of black studies. Today, given the escalation of antiblack racism manifested in the upholding of institutionalized violence by the state and the continued marginality of African-Americans, we cannot afford to forget Walker’s push for racial egalitarianism: it is more urgent than ever.This book examines the writings of seven English women economists from the period 1735–1811. It reveals that contrary to what…
standard accounts of the history of economic thought suggest, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women intellectuals were undertaking incisive and gender-sensitive analyses of the economy.Women’s Economic Thought in the Romantic Age argues that established notions of what constitutes economic enquiry, topics, and genres of writing have for centuries marginalised the perspectives and experiences of women and obscured the knowledge they recorded in novels, memoirs, or pamphlets. This has led to an underrepresentation of women in the canon of economic theory. Using insights from literary studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and feminist economics, the book develops a transdisciplinary methodology that redresses this imbalance and problematises the distinction between literary and economic texts. In its in-depth readings of selected writings by Sarah Chapone, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Mary Robinson, Priscilla Wakefield, Mary Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen, this book uncovers the originality and topicality of their insights on the economics of marriage, women and paid work, and moral economics.Combining historical analysis with conceptual revision, Women’s Economic Thought in the Romantic Age retrieves women’s overlooked intellectual contributions and radically breaks down the barriers between literature and economics. It will be of interest to researchers and students from across the humanities and social sciences, in particular the history of economic thought, English literary and cultural studies, gender studies, economics, eighteenth-century and Romantic studies, social history, and the history of ideas.On Wings of Words: The Extraordinary Life of Emily Dickinson
Par Jennifer Berne. 2020
An inspiring and kid-accessible biography of one of the world's most famous poets.Emily Dickinson, who famously wrote "Hope is the…
thing with feathers that perches in the soul," is brought to life in this moving story. In a small New England town lives Emily Dickinson, a girl in love with small things—a flower petal, a bird, a ray of light, a word. In those small things, her brilliant imagination can see the wide world—and in her words, she takes wing. From celebrated children's author Jennifer Berne comes a lyrical and lovely account of the life of Emily Dickinson: her courage, her faith, and her gift to the world. With Dickinson's own inimitable poetry woven throughout, this lyrical biography is not just a tale of prodigious talent, but also of the power we have to transform ourselves and to reach one another when we speak from the soul.• Fantastic educational opportunity to share Emily Dickinson's story and poetry with young readers• An inspirational real-life story that will appeal to children and adults alike.• Jennifer Berne is the author of critically acclaimed children's biographies of Albert Einstein and Jacques Cousteau.Fans who enjoyed Emily Writes: Emily Dickinson and her Poetic Beginnings, Emily and Carlo, and Uncle Emily will love On Wings of Words.• Books for kids ages 5–8• Poetry for children• Biographies for childrenJennifer Berne is the award-winning author of the biographies Manfish: A Story of Jacques Cousteau and On a Beam of Light: A Story of Albert Einstein. She lives in Copake, New York.Becca Stadtlander is the illustrator of many children's and young adult publications, including Sleep Tight Farm. She was born and raised in Covington, Kentucky.Variable Valve Timings: Memoirs of a car tragic
Par Chris Harris. 2023
'What defines the car-saddo condition is not being able to recall a time when the toy-car-era of your life actually…
ended. Because for us sufferers, it never does.' Nobody knows cars like Chris Harris does. He calls it 'unhinged geekery', but the rest of the world call it infectious enthusiasm, adrenaline fuelled escapism and rigorous journalistic integrity.And then there are his famous skills at the wheel, from city cars to rally cars, not forgetting the Guinness World Record 3.4km sideways in an electric car.And now for the first time, Harris takes us down the road of his life-long obsession with the automobile - along surprising diversions, around hazards and obstructions, down the fast lane collecting Gs and back to the lock-up to prep the stock.From the six-year-old who could recite the stats from What Car? magazine to the YouTube car guru whose honest reviews got him banned by Ferrari. From the Scalextric track of his childhood, to podiums as a racing driver out in the world. From behind his garage doors to the floodlit Top Gear studio.Variable Valve Timings brings you an incredibly engaging story of adventure and petrolhead joy, told with wit, warmth and disarming honesty. This book is a true one-off, just like Chris.Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist
Par Hunter S. Thompson. 2000
From the king of “Gonzo” journalism and bestselling author who brought you Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas comes another…
astonishing volume of letters by Hunter S. Thompson.Brazen, incisive, and outrageous as ever, this second volume of Thompson&’s private correspondence is the highly anticipated follow-up to The Proud Highway. When that first book of letters appeared in 1997, Time pronounced it "deliriously entertaining"; Rolling Stone called it "brilliant beyond description"; and The New York Times celebrated its "wicked humor and bracing political conviction." Spanning the years between 1968 and 1976, these never-before-published letters show Thompson building his legend: running for sheriff in Aspen, Colorado; creating the seminal road book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; twisting political reporting to new heights for Rolling Stone; and making sense of it all in the landmark Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. To read Thompson's dispatches from these years—addressed to the author's friends, enemies, editors, and creditors, and such notables as Jimmy Carter, Tom Wolfe, and Kurt Vonnegut—is to read a raw, revolutionary eyewitness account of one of the most exciting and pivotal eras in American history.The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization
Par Roland Ennos. 2000
A &“smart and surprising&” (Booklist) &“expansive history&” (Publishers Weekly) detailing the role that wood and trees have played in our…
global ecosystem—including human evolution and the rise and fall of empires—in the bestselling tradition of Yuval Harari&’s Sapiens and Mark Kurlansky&’s Salt.As the dominant species on Earth, humans have made astonishing progress since our ancestors came down from the trees. But how did the descendants of small primates manage to walk upright, become top predators, and populate the world? How were humans able to develop civilizations and produce a globalized economy? Now, in The Age of Wood, Roland Ennos shows for the first time that the key to our success has been our relationship with wood. &“A lively history of biology, mechanics, and culture that stretches back 60 million years&” (Nature) The Age of Wood reinterprets human history and shows how our ability to exploit wood&’s unique properties has profoundly shaped our bodies and minds, societies, and lives. Ennos takes us on a sweeping journey from Southeast Asia and West Africa where great apes swing among the trees, build nests, and fashion tools; to East Africa where hunter gatherers collected their food; to the structural design of wooden temples in China and Japan; and to Northern England, where archaeologists trace how coal enabled humans to build an industrial world. Addressing the effects of industrialization—including the use of fossil fuels and other energy-intensive materials to replace timber—The Age of Wood not only shows the essential role that trees play in the history and evolution of human existence, but also argues that for the benefit of our planet we must return to more traditional ways of growing, using, and understanding trees. A brilliant blend of recent research and existing scientific knowledge, this is an &“excellent, thorough history in an age of our increasingly fraught relationships with natural resources&” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).The Ethics of Ambiguity: The Second Sex And The Ethics Of Ambiguity
Par Simone De Beauvoir. 2018
From the groundbreaking author of The Second Sex comes a radical argument for ethical responsibility and freedom. In this classic introduction…
to existentialist thought, French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir&’s The Ethics of Ambiguity simultaneously pays homage to and grapples with her French contemporaries, philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, by arguing that the freedoms in existentialism carry with them certain ethical responsibilities. De Beauvoir outlines a series of &“ways of being&” (the adventurer, the passionate person, the lover, the artist, and the intellectual), each of which overcomes the former&’s deficiencies, and therefore can live up to the responsibilities of freedom. Ultimately, de Beauvoir argues that in order to achieve true freedom, one must battle against the choices and activities of those who suppress it. The Ethics of Ambiguity is the book that launched Simone de Beauvoir&’s feminist and existential philosophy. It remains a concise yet thorough examination of existence and what it means to be human.Black Meme: A History of The Images That Make Us
Par Legacy Russell. 2024
"Unsettles, expands and deepens our understanding of the black meme...necessary reading; brilliant and utterly convincing."–Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes"You…
will be galvanized by Legacy Russell&’s analytic brilliance and visceral eloquence." –Margo Jefferson, author of Constructing a Nervous SystemA history of Black imagery that recasts our understanding of visual culture and technology In Black Meme, Legacy Russell, award-winning author of the groundbreaking Glitch Feminism, explores the &“meme&” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, mining both archival and contemporary media. Russell argues that without the contributions of Black people, digital culture would not exist in its current form. These meditations include the circulation of lynching postcards; why a mother allowed Jet magazine to publish a picture of her dead son, Emmett Till; and how the televised broadcast of protesters in Selma changed the debate on civil rights. Questions of the media representation of Blackness come to the fore as Russell considers how a citizen-recorded footage of the LAPD beating Rodney King became the first viral video. And the Anita Hill hearings shed light on the media&’s creation of the Black icon. The ownership of Black imagery and death is considered in the story of Tamara Lanier&’s fight to reclaim the daguerreotypes of her enslaved ancestors from Harvard. Meanwhile the live broadcast on Facebook of the murder of Philando Castile by the police after he was stopped for a broken taillight forces us to bear witness to the persistent legacy of the Black meme. Through imagery, memory and technology Black Meme shows us how images of Blackness have always been central to our understanding of the modern world.Canadians Who Innovate: The Trailblazers and Ideas That Are Changing the World
Par Roseann O'Reilly Runte. 2024
Profiles of some of the most inventive and creative Canadians and the ideas that are making Canada a leading nation…
in innovation.From saving lives to saving harvests... From discovering ancient diamonds to identifying the first exo-planet... From driverless cars to quantum computers... From Nobel laureates to your next-door neighbor... This book offers uplifting stories of innovative Canadians. Canadians Who Innovate includes two Nobel laureates, an astronaut, extraordinary business leaders, the godfathers of artificial intelligence, and top quantum experts, including the inventor of what may be the next quantum computer. It features profiles of the first director of engineering at Google, who is now working on nuclear fusion; a medical researcher who communicates on TikTok about the efficacy and potential for RNA vaccine technology; and a PhD in nuclear physics who has twice won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Meet the linguist who works with Indigenous people to make online dictionaries, an internationally consulted specialist on migration, an agri-tech investor, a world specialist on permafrost, and the expert in systems and number theory who has a way to fix health care. And don&’t forget the engineer who grew human cells on apples, a feat that is leading to the creation of replacement organs that do not require donors—not to be confused with the aerospace technology developer who created a tethering system to clean up space debris and a 3-D printer that prints biological tissue. Featuring brilliant thinkers from coast to coast to coast, and others from around the world who now call Canada home, Canadians Who Innovate paints a promising picture of a cleaner, healthier, more innovative future for us all.Amy Post&’s Out of the Gray, into the Light is a gut-wrenching story of parental helplessness following their daugther&’s diagnosis…
of malignant liver cancer, and it shares the raw, unfiltered emotions of a family suddenly sucked into a healthcare system that often leaves weakened patients to stand silent and alone, in desperate need of an advocate.&“Now I know what it is to advocate for someone, to put everything I have into something outside of myself.&” —Amy Post &“Your daughter has malignant liver cancer.&” For Amy Post and her family, the doctor&’s words shook their world and changed the trajectory of their lives forever. When Amy received a call from her children&’s school telling her that her daughter wasn&’t playing but was instead sitting down on the playground, her mind went into high alert. For months, she&’d had a nagging suspicion that something wasn&’t right with her three-year-old. Exhaustion, random fevers, and now this. Amy and her husband were not prepared, though, for the devastating diagnosis. Nor were they ready for the unveiling of a rare gene that promised not one, but three devastating forms of cancer throughout their child&’s life—if she survived this one. In her book, Amy Post shares the raw, unfiltered emotions of a family suddenly sucked into a healthcare system that runs as a machine but often leaves weakened patients to stand silent and alone and in desperate need of an advocate. It&’s a gut-wrenching story of parental helplessness that grows into a mother&’s determination and fierce fight for survival for her daughter—and then for herself."A funny, marvelously readable portrait of one of the most brilliant and eccentric men in history." --The Seattle Times Paul…
Erdos was an amazing and prolific mathematician whose life as a world-wandering numerical nomad was legendary. He published almost 1500 scholarly papers before his death in 1996, and he probably thought more about math problems than anyone in history. Like a traveling salesman offering his thoughts as wares, Erdos would show up on the doorstep of one mathematician or another and announce, "My brain is open." After working through a problem, he'd move on to the next place, the next solution. Hoffman's book, like Sylvia Nasar's biography of John Nash, A Beautiful Mind, reveals a genius's life that transcended the merely quirky. But Erdos's brand of madness was joyful, unlike Nash's despairing schizophrenia. Erdos never tried to dilute his obsessive passion for numbers with ordinary emotional interactions, thus avoiding hurting the people around him, as Nash did. Oliver Sacks writes of Erdos: "A mathematical genius of the first order, Paul Erdos was totally obsessed with his subject--he thought and wrote mathematics for nineteen hours a day until the day he died. He traveled constantly, living out of a plastic bag, and had no interest in food, sex, companionship, art--all that is usually indispensable to a human life."The Man Who Loved Only Numbers is easy to love, despite his strangeness. It's hard not to have affection for someone who referred to children as "epsilons," from the Greek letter used to represent small quantities in mathematics; a man whose epitaph for himself read, "Finally I am becoming stupider no more"; and whose only really necessary tool to do his work was a quiet and open mind. Hoffman, who followed and spoke with Erdos over the last 10 years of his life, introduces us to an undeniably odd, yet pure and joyful, man who loved numbers more than he loved God--whom he referred to as SF, for Supreme Fascist. He was often misunderstood, and he certainly annoyed people sometimes, but Paul Erdos is no doubt missed. --Therese LittletonGood Guys, Bad Guys: The Perils of Men's Gender Activism
Par Emily K. Carian. 2024
Explores questions of masculinity, privilege, and identity to explain why some men become feminists while others become men’s rights activistsIn…
the evolving landscape of gender activism in the United States, it is intriguing that four-in-ten American men now identify as feminists. Despite this seemingly positive shift, gender inequality remains deeply rooted in the US. Good Guys, Bad Guys delves into this paradox, unraveling the complexities of men’s feminist allyship and its limitations in propelling genuine progress.Emily K. Carian masterfully dissects the narratives of two distinct groups of gender activists: feminist men and men who belong to the men's rights movement, which opposes feminism. By engaging directly with the men themselves, Carian constructs a compelling analysis of their journeys into these contrasting social movements.Surprisingly, Carian finds that both feminist men and men’s rights activists share a common motivation for their engagement in gender activism: the desire to be perceived as “good men.” However, this well-intentioned yet superficial drive hinders feminist men from envisioning concrete and effective strategies to challenge gender inequality. Conversely, it fuels men’s rights activists’ participation in a movement that fosters a virulent misogyny.Good Guys, Bad Guys exposes how even self-proclaimed feminist men inadvertently perpetuate gender inequality through their attitudes, behaviors, and relationships. As society navigates the complexities of gender activism, this book serves as a valuable resource in guiding the path towards a truly equal and inclusive future.Doing It All: The Social Power of Single Motherhood
Par Ruby Russell. 2024
A feminist exploration of single motherhood and a passionate call to reclaim the power of mothering In the United States,…
one child in five is raised by a single mother. Yet the single mom is still cast as victim or welfare queen, sexually irresponsible or too independent for her own (or her children&’s) good. In Doing It All,journalist and single mother Ruby Russell tells a different story, of single mothering not defined by loss but whole and powerful in its own right. She finds narratives of liberation in Victorian brothels and postwar British slums, in Black feminist theory and the grassroots activism of women fighting for welfare rights. Doing It All is a personal quest for empowerment, a fierce critique of the systems that leave single moms marginalized and exhausted, and a call to reclaim mothering as the life force of sustainable, connected, and radically responsible communities.Discipline Problems: How Students of Color Trouble Whiteness in Schools
Par Tadashi Dozono. 2024
Angel, a Black tenth-grader at a New York City public school, self-identifies as a nerd and likes to learn. But…
she’s troubled that her history classes leave out events like the genocide and dispossession of Indigenous people in the Americas, presenting a sugar-coated image of the United States that is at odds with her everyday experience. “The history I learned in school is simpler,” she says. “The world I live in is a lot more complex.”Angel, like every student interviewed in Discipline Problems, has been identified by teachers as a “troublemaker,” a student whose behavior disrupts classroom norms and interferes with instruction. But her critiques of the curriculum she’s taught speak to her curiosity and insight, crucial foundations for understanding history. Like many students who have been marginalized by systemic racism in American schools, she exposes the shortcomings of her classrooms’ academic environments by challenging both the content and the methods of her education. All too often, these challenges are framed as “troublemaking,” and the students are disciplined for “acting out” instead of being rewarded for their intellectual engagement.Tadashi Dozono, a professor of education and former high school social studies teacher, takes seriously the often-overlooked critiques that students of color who get labeled as troublemakers direct toward their high school history curriculum. He reinterprets “troublemaking,” usually cast as a behavioral deficit, as an intellectual asset and form of reasoning that challenges the “disciplining reason” of classrooms where whiteness is valued over the histories and knowledge of people of color. Dozono shows how what are traditionally framed as discipline problems can be seen through a different lens as responses to educational practices that marginalize non-white students. Discipline Problems reveals how students of color seek out alternate avenues for understanding their world and imagines a pedagogy that champions the curiosity, intellect, and knowledge of marginalized learners.