Statistical Panic

Statistical Panic
Author: Kathleen Woodward
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2009-01-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0822392313

In this moving and thoughtful book, Kathleen Woodward explores the politics and poetics of the emotions, focusing on American culture since the 1960s. She argues that we are constrained in terms of gender, race, and age by our culture’s scripts for “emotional” behavior and that the accelerating impoverishment of interiority is a symptom of our increasingly media-saturated culture. She also shows how we can be empowered by stories that express our experience, revealing the value of our emotions as a crucial form of intelligence. Referring discreetly to her own experience, Woodward examines the interpenetration of social structures and subjectivity, considering how psychological emotions are social phenomena, with feminist anger, racial shame, old-age depression, and sympathy for non-human cyborgs (including robots) as key cases in point. She discusses how emerging institutional and discursive structures engender “new” affects that in turn can help us understand our changing world if we are attentive to them—the “statistical panic” produced by the risk society, with its numerical portents of disease and mortality; the rage prompted by impenetrable and bloated bureaucracies; the brutal shame experienced by those caught in the crossfire of the media; and the conservative compassion that is not an emotion at all, only an empty political slogan. The orbit of Statistical Panic is wide, drawing in feminist theory, critical phenomenology, and recent theories of the emotions. But at its heart are stories. As an antidote to the vacuous dramas of media culture, with its mock emotions and scattershot sensations, Woodward turns to the autobiographical narrative. Stories of illness—by Joan Didion, Yvonne Rainer, Paul Monette, and Alice Wexler, among others—receive special attention, with the inexhaustible emotion of grief framing the book as a whole.

Resilient Life

Resilient Life
Author: Brad Evans
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2014-04-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0745682839

What does it mean to live dangerously? This is not just a philosophical question or an ethical call to reflect upon our own individual recklessness. It is a deeply political issue, fundamental to the new doctrine of ‘resilience’ that is becoming a key term of art for governing planetary life in the 21st Century. No longer should we think in terms of evading the possibility of traumatic experiences. Catastrophic events, we are told, are not just inevitable but learning experiences from which we have to grow and prosper, collectively and individually. Vulnerability to threat, injury and loss has to be accepted as a reality of human existence. In this original and compelling text, Brad Evans and Julian Reid explore the political and philosophical stakes of the resilience turn in security and governmental thinking. Resilience, they argue, is a neo-liberal deceit that works by disempowering endangered populations of autonomous agency. Its consequences represent a profound assault on the human subject whose meaning and sole purpose is reduced to survivability. Not only does this reveal the nihilistic qualities of a liberal project that is coming to terms with its political demise. All life now enters into lasting crises that are catastrophic unto the end.

Culture and Panic Disorder

Culture and Panic Disorder
Author: Devon E. Hinton
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2009-03-13
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0804771111

Psychiatric classifications created in one culture may not be as universal as we assume, and it is difficult to determine the validity of a classification even in the culture in which it was created. Culture and Panic Disorder explores how the psychiatric classification of panic disorder first emerged, how medical theories of this disorder have shifted through time, and whether or not panic disorder can actually be diagnosed across cultures. In this breakthrough volume a distinguished group of medical and psychological anthropologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and historians of science provide ethnographic insights as they investigate the presentation and generation of panic disorder in various cultures. The first available work with a focus on the historical and cross-cultural aspects of panic disorders, this book presents a fresh opportunity to reevaluate Western theories of panic that were formerly taken for granted.

Discourse, the Body, and Identity

Discourse, the Body, and Identity
Author: J. Coupland
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2002-12-17
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1403918546

The 'body' and 'discourse' seem diametrically opposed, but we interact with our bodies and represent ourselves and our relationships in bodily terms. This volume integrates new studies by leading researchers in sociolinguistics, sociology, social psychology and cultural theory. It explores the many interfaces of body and discourse, organized under three main themes: the body as an interactional resource; ideological representations of the body; and discursive constructions of the body in normal and pathological contexts.

Portuguese Philosophy of Technology

Portuguese Philosophy of Technology
Author: Helena Mateus Jerónimo
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2022-11-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3031146301

This volume is a collection of essays of a philosophical nature on the subject of technology, introducing authors from the Portuguese-speaking community, namely from Portugal itself, Africa and Brazil. Their contributions detail a unique perspective on technology, placing this important topic within the historical, ideological and social contexts of their countries, all of which share a common language. The shared history of these countries and the cultural and economic specificities of each one have stimulated singular insights into these thinkers’ reflections. The essays are thematically diverse. Among the topics covered are technogenic knowledge, visions of technology, risks and uncertainties, mediatization, digitalization, and datafication, engineering practice and ethics, alternative technoscientific strategies, ontotechnologies of the body, virtual and archive. The contributions also explore other themes that are more closely related to the semi-peripheral world, such as technological dependence and the incorporation of Western technology into the social structure of ancestral communities. This book appeals to students and researchers and provides a voice to authors whose work are not usually available in English-language publications. It serves as an ideal guide for all those who seek rigorous and geographically widespread knowledge regarding thinking on technology in several Portuguese-speaking countries.

Empires of Panic

Empires of Panic
Author: Robert Peckham
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2015-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9888208446

Empires of Panic is the first book to explore how panics have been historically produced, defined, and managed across different colonial, imperial, and post-imperial settings—from early nineteenth-century East Asia to twenty-first-century America. Contributors consider panic in relation to colonial anxieties, rumors, indigenous resistance, and crises, particularly in relation to epidemic disease. How did Western government agencies, policymakers, planners, and other authorities understand, deal with, and neutralize panics? What role did evolving technologies of communication play in the amplification of local panics into global events? Engaging with these questions, the book challenges conventional histories to show how intensifying processes of intelligence gathering did not consolidate empire, but rather served to produce critical uncertainties—the uneven terrain of imperial panic. Robert Peckham is associate professor in the Department of History and co-director of the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine at the University of Hong Kong. "Charting the relays of rumor and knowledge that stoke colonial fears of disease, disorder, and disaster, Empires of Panic offers timely and cautionary insight into how viscerally epidemics inflame imperial anxieties, and how words and their communication over new technologies accelerate panic, rally government intervention, and unsettle and entrench the exercise of global power. Relevant a century ago and even more so today." — Nayan Shah, University of Southern California; author ofContagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown "Empires generated anxiety as much as ambition. This fine study focuses on anxieties generated by disease. It is the first book of its kind to track shifting forms of panic through different geopolitical regimes and imperial formations over the course of two centuries. Working across medical and imperial histories, it is a major contribution to both." — Andrew S. Thompson, University of Exeter; author of Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850–1914(with Gary B. Magee)

Men of Color in Higher Education

Men of Color in Higher Education
Author: Ronald A. Williams
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 149
Release: 2023-07-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000979644

Given the continued plight of men of color in college after a decade of ineffective interventions focused more on “fixing the student” than on addressing the social, structural and institutional forces that undermine his academic achievement, this book is intended as a catalyst to change the direction of the dialogue, by providing a new theoretical framework and strength-based models for developing strategies for success.This book brings together five of today’s leading scholars concerned with the condition of males of color in higher education – LeManuel Bitsóí, Edmund T. Gordon, Shaun Harper, Victor Sáenz and Robert Teranishi, who collaborated closely through of a series of conversations convened by the College Board to diagnose the common factors impeding the success of under-represented males and to identify the particular barriers and cultural issues pertaining to the racial and ethnic groups they examine.This cohesive volume starts with the recognition that understanding males' disengagement from the classroom requires determining what it means to be a male in a non-dominant group in today’s society. The authors use the methods of feminist theory to uncover the impact of dominant paradigms of White, middle-class, heteronormative masculinity on men of color in general, to define what comprises masculinity for various groups, subgroups and individuals, and to lay bare the social and institutional forces that perpetuate constructions of masculinity that negatively impact men of color. They demonstrate that researchers and practitioners alike must pay more careful attention to within-group diversity as they study college men of color and create initiatives that respond to their varied needs. They establish the need for men of color campus initiatives to be mindful of the masculinities with which students enter college, as well as how they develop, negotiate and perform their gender identities on campus; the vital importance, in developing programs and interventions, of addressing the sociological undercurrents of men’s bad behaviors and poor help-seeking tendencies; and for providing opportunities for men to engage in critical individual and collective reflection on how they have been socialized to think of themselves as men.This book advances the critical priorities of increasing enrollments and completion rates among college men of color, and of graduating well-developed men with strong, conflict-free gender identities. For practitioners who work with these populations, it offers insights and signposts to create successful programs; for researchers it offers a set of new directions for analysis; and for policymakers, new ways of thinking about how policy and funding mechanisms ought to be reconsidered to be more effective in responding this issue.

Cultural Studies Review

Cultural Studies Review
Author: Chris Healy and Stephen Muecke (eds)
Publisher: Melbourne Univ. Publishing
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2008
Genre: Panic
ISBN: 052285527X

The October 2008 Cultural Studies Review is a special issue focusing on cultures of panic, particularly recent examples of moral panic arising from issues of race, gender and sexuality. The diverse essays deal with 'men of Middle Eastern appearance', the trial of Private Kovko, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the use of Ritalin, concerns around children and sexuality in Australia, and arts funding in the United States during the 'culture wars'. The moral panic has centrally to do with the behaviour of crowds, particularly the virtual crowds created by the mass media. It's a mechanism of expulsion, and thus at the same time of group solidarity. It's also a particularly powerful genre of the tabloid media: in its identification and shaming of deviant social groups it rigidly defines and reinforces moral norms, and is complicit with political strategies of consolidation and othering which create and depend on a sense of horror at refugees who wilfully throw their children overboard or push in to the front of the 'queue', at paedophiles grooming children over the internet, at drug-crazed criminals and bingeing teenagers... The challenge is to move beyond the realisation that moral panics are not rationally constructed to an analysis of the passional bases of the social order, and to an understanding of how our politics might deal with this without itself falling into the contagion of panic. The diverse collection of essays gathered together in this edition takes up that challenge.

Selling the Future

Selling the Future
Author: Ryan Moran
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2024-01-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1501773305

In Selling the Future, Ryan Moran explains how the life insurance industry in Japan exploited its association with mutuality and community to commodify and govern lives. Covering the years from the start of the industry in 1881 through the end of World War II, Moran describes insurance companies and government officials working together to create a picture of the future as precarious and dangerous. Since it was impossible for individual consumers to deal with every contingency on their own, insurance industry administrators argued that their usage of statistical data enabled them to chart the predictable future for the aggregate. Through insurance, companies and the state thus offered consumers a means to a perfectible future in an era filled with repeated crises. Life insurance functioned as an important modernist technology within Japan and its colonies to instantiate expectations for responsibility, to reconfigure meanings of mutuality, and to normalize new social formations (such as the nuclear family) as essential to life. Life insurance thus offers an important vehicle for examining the confluence of modes of mobilizing and organizing bodies, the expropriation of financial resources, and the action of disciplining workers into a capitalist system.

Under Pressure

Under Pressure
Author: Lisa Damour, Ph.D.
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2019-02-12
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0399180060

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An urgently needed guide to the alarming increase in anxiety and stress experienced by girls from elementary school through college, from the author of Untangled Dr. Lisa Damour worked as an expert collaborator on Pixar’s Inside Out 2! “An invaluable read for anyone who has girls, works with girls, or cares about girls—for everyone!”—Claire Shipman, author of The Confidence Code and The Confidence Code for Girls Though anxiety has risen among young people overall, studies confirm that it has skyrocketed in girls. Research finds that the number of girls who said that they often felt nervous, worried, or fearful jumped 55 percent from 2009 to 2014, while the comparable number for adolescent boys has remained unchanged. As a clinical psychologist who specializes in working with girls, Lisa Damour, Ph.D., has witnessed this rising tide of stress and anxiety in her own research, in private practice, and in the all-girls’ school where she consults. She knew this had to be the topic of her new book. In the engaging, anecdotal style and reassuring tone that won over thousands of readers of her first book, Untangled, Damour starts by addressing the facts about psychological pressure. She explains the surprising and underappreciated value of stress and anxiety: that stress can helpfully stretch us beyond our comfort zones, and anxiety can play a key role in keeping girls safe. When we emphasize the benefits of stress and anxiety, we can help our daughters take them in stride. But no parents want their daughter to suffer from emotional overload, so Damour then turns to the many facets of girls’ lives where tension takes hold: their interactions at home, pressures at school, social anxiety among other girls and among boys, and their lives online. As readers move through the layers of girls’ lives, they’ll learn about the critical steps that adults can take to shield their daughters from the toxic pressures to which our culture—including we, as parents—subjects girls. Readers who know Damour from Untangled or the New York Times, or from her regular appearances on CBS News, will be drawn to this important new contribution to understanding and supporting today’s girls. Praise for Under Pressure “Truly a must-read for parents, teachers, coaches, and mentors wanting to help girls along the path to adulthood.”—Julie Lythcott-Haims, New York Times bestselling author of How to Raise an Adult