Vibrant Matter

Vibrant Matter
Author: Jane Bennett
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2010-01-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0822391627

In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as the effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events. Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy.

Vital Voices

Vital Voices
Author: Alyse Nelson
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2012-06-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1118184777

How women around the world are leading powerful change Women's progress is global progress. Where there is an increase in women's university enrollment rates, women's earnings, and maternal health, and a reduction in violence against women, we see more prosperous communities, better educated, healthier families, and the preservation of equal human rights. Yet globally, women remain the most consistently under-utilized resource. Vital Voices calls for and makes possible transformative leadership around the world. In Vital Voices, CEO Alyse Nelson shares the stories of remarkable, world-changing women, as well as the story of how Vital Voices was founded, crossing lines that typically divide. For 15 years, Vital Voices has brought together women who want to enable others to become change agents in their governments, advocates for social justice, and supporters of democracy. They equip women with management and business development skills to expand their enterprises and create jobs in their communities. Their voices, stories, and hard-earned lessons—shared here for the first time—are deeply authentic and truly vital. Features interviews and first-person accounts of global leaders, such as Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia, and Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Prize-winning Burmese pro-democracy leader, as well as business leaders Draws on the work of the Vital Voices, the organization founded by Hillary Clinton in 1997 as a government initiative that transformed into a leading non-profit, which enables a network of 10,000 emerging women leaders in politics, human rights, and economic development in 127 countries. These women have gone on to mentor and train more than 500,000 Focuses on the key elements of the Vital Voices five-step model of transformational leadership, including how to find a voice, lead with purpose, cross lines that divide, and more Through the firsthand accounts of trail-blazing leaders, Vital Voices introduces unforgettable, inspiring women who are shaping our world.

Arbitrary Lines

Arbitrary Lines
Author: M. Nolan Gray
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2022-06-21
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1642832553

What if scrapping one flawed policy could bring US cities closer to addressing debilitating housing shortages, stunted growth and innovation, persistent racial and economic segregation, and car-dependent development? It’s time for America to move beyond zoning, argues city planner M. Nolan Gray in Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. With lively explanations and stories, Gray shows why zoning abolition is a necessary—if not sufficient—condition for building more affordable, vibrant, equitable, and sustainable cities. The arbitrary lines of zoning maps across the country have come to dictate where Americans may live and work, forcing cities into a pattern of growth that is segregated and sprawling. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Reform is in the air, with cities and states across the country critically reevaluating zoning. In cities as diverse as Minneapolis, Fayetteville, and Hartford, the key pillars of zoning are under fire, with apartment bans being scrapped, minimum lot sizes dropping, and off-street parking requirements disappearing altogether. Some American cities—including Houston, America’s fourth-largest city—already make land-use planning work without zoning. In Arbitrary Lines, Gray lays the groundwork for this ambitious cause by clearing up common confusions and myths about how American cities regulate growth and examining the major contemporary critiques of zoning. Gray sets out some of the efforts currently underway to reform zoning and charts how land-use regulation might work in the post-zoning American city. Despite mounting interest, no single book has pulled these threads together for a popular audience. In Arbitrary Lines, Gray fills this gap by showing how zoning has failed to address even our most basic concerns about urban growth over the past century, and how we can think about a new way of planning a more affordable, prosperous, equitable, and sustainable American city.

When Bright Kids Can't Learn

When Bright Kids Can't Learn
Author: John F. Heath
Publisher: When Bright Kids Can\'t Learn
Total Pages: 99
Release: 2007-09
Genre: Learning disabled children
ISBN: 0978542304

The title When Bright Kids Can't Learn might seem to be an oxymoron. However one in five people fit the profile. For every such struggling student there are three advocated who are aggressively trying to find a solution. This book is written for those who are searching for the key that will set mind free.

Microsoft Encarta Thesaurus

Microsoft Encarta Thesaurus
Author: Microsoft
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 612
Release: 2002-07-14
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 9780312983635

This portable guide features over 200,000 synonyms and antonyms in a quick-reference A-to-Z format of over 25,000 entries, including clearly labeled slang, informal, technical, and literary terms. Also features panels to compare and contrast words with similar meanings, "Word bank" panels with lists for selected topics, and a "Test Your Wordpower" section enabling users to assess their vocabulary range and verbal speed. Martin's Press. (July)

Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz
Author: José David Saldívar
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2022-08-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1478023333

In Junot Díaz: On the Half-Life of Love, José David Saldívar offers a critical examination of one of the leading American writers of his generation. He explores Díaz’s imaginative work and the diasporic and immigrant world he inhabits, showing how his influences converged in his fiction and how his writing—especially his Pulitzer Prize--winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—radically changed the course of US Latinx literature and created a new way of viewing the decolonial world. Saldívar examines several aspects of Díaz’s career, from his vexed relationship to the literary aesthetics of Whiteness that dominated his MFA experience and his critiques of the colonialities of power, race, and gender in culture and societies of the Dominican Republic, United States, and the Américas to his use of the science-fiction imaginary to explore the capitalist zombification of our planet. Throughout, Saldívar shows how Díaz’s works exemplify the literary currents of the early twenty-first century.

Georges Rouault and Material Imagining

Georges Rouault and Material Imagining
Author: Jennifer Johnson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2020-11-26
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1501346113

Described as a difficult and dark painter, Georges Rouault's oeuvre is deeply experimental. Images of the circus emerge from a plethora of chaotic marks, while numerous landscapes appear as if ossified in thick paint. Georges Rouault and Material Imagining approaches Rouault in relation to contemporary theories about making and material, examining how he constructs a 'material consciousness' that departs from other modern painters. Rouault's work explodes the genre of painting, drawing upon the residue of Gustave Moreau's symbolism, the extremities of Fauvism, and the radical theatrical experiments of Alfred Jarry. The repetitions and re-workings at the heart of Rouault's process defy conventional chronological treatment, and place the emphasis upon the coming-into-being of the work of art. Ultimately, the process of making is revealed as both a search for understanding and a response to the problematic world of the twentieth century. Georges Rouault and Material Imagining therefore offers an innovative critical approach to the various questions raised by this difficult modernist.

Black Cipher Files Box Set

Black Cipher Files Box Set
Author: Lisa Hughey
Publisher: Lisa Hughey
Total Pages: 1836
Release: 2015-09-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

Black Cipher Files Box Set (features Blowback, Betrayals, and Burned): The Black Cipher Files is a fast-paced, edgy romance and espionage series that features hot, alpha heroes and kick-ass heroines, working to uncover long-buried secrets from the past so they can save their future. #1 Blowback Blowback: a deadly unintended consequence of a covert operation Thirteen years ago, Jamie Hunt sacrificed everything to keep her sister protected and safe. Now she lives alone, works alone, survives alone. When a covert mission goes horribly wrong, suddenly she can trust no one. Not her boss, not her agency, not even herself. Lucas Goodman, former FBI agent turned PI, is on the trail of a missing teenager when his investigation leads him to Jamie. Despite her attempts to ditch him, Lucas tenaciously continues to shadow Jamie, realizing he doesn’t just want information...he wants her. When their investigations collide and her sister is in danger, Jamie is forced to team up with Lucas. Together they must expose the connection between agents’ murders, a missing teenager, and a sixty-year-old government conspiracy. But can she open her heart to find the truth within the lies? #2 Betrayals STACI GRANT IS DEAD--OR IS SHE? He saw the photographs from Afghanistan, but Jordan Ramirez refuses to believe. His missing lover was the best CIA officer in the field. If anyone could find a way to stay alive, it was Staci. Now Jordan has to do the impossible: find Staci and convince her that trusting him means the difference between staying alive or staying dead. SOMEONE STILL WANTS HER DEAD... Staci Grant has been betrayed. Captured, imprisoned and tortured, it took all her skills to escape. Now she is determined to uncover who set her up and why, a mission that leaves no room for trust. Not even her lover. ...AND WON’T STOP UNTIL SHE IS. When Jordan finds her, he won’t take no for an answer, and together they enter a desperate race to unravel the truths behind a decades old secret. But each revelation brings fresh betrayals that threaten their love and their lives. Betrayals is the story of a CIA NOC officer and a former HRT/FBI agent in a desperate race to discover who wants Staci Grant dead. Betrayals is a fast-paced, edgy romantic suspense. #3 Burned BURNED is the third and final installment in the Black Cipher Files trilogy. Zeke Hawthorne, a programmer and hacker at the NSA, is in trouble. Red-badged and under investigation to make sure had hasn’t divulged national secrets, he’s sent on a boondoggle. All he has to do is keep an eye on Sunshine, from afar, and make sure she’s safe. Sunshine Smith’s entire world was blown apart thirteen years ago when her obsessive stepfather killed her grandparents. She and her mother changed their names and went into hiding to escape. For years they’ve been safe…until now. When Sunshine is threatened, Zeke cannot keep his distance. Only danger and betrayal are coming for Zeke too. Zeke and Sunshine must combine forces to stay one step ahead of the peril that stalks them, but trust between two people who grew up without faith is a difficult bond to form. Will fears from the past steal their future?

Creating Cultures of Thinking

Creating Cultures of Thinking
Author: Ron Ritchhart
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2015-03-09
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1118974603

Discover why and how schools must become places where thinking is valued, visible, and actively promoted As educators, parents, and citizens, we must settle for nothing less than environments that bring out the best in people, take learning to the next level, allow for great discoveries, and propel both the individual and the group forward into a lifetime of learning. This is something all teachers want and all students deserve. In Creating Cultures of Thinking: The 8 Forces We Must Master to Truly Transform Our Schools, Ron Ritchhart, author of Making Thinking Visible, explains how creating a culture of thinking is more important to learning than any particular curriculum and he outlines how any school or teacher can accomplish this by leveraging 8 cultural forces: expectations, language, time, modeling, opportunities, routines, interactions, and environment. With the techniques and rich classroom vignettes throughout this book, Ritchhart shows that creating a culture of thinking is not about just adhering to a particular set of practices or a general expectation that people should be involved in thinking. A culture of thinking produces the feelings, energy, and even joy that can propel learning forward and motivate us to do what at times can be hard and challenging mental work.