While more than 80 percent of the world’s commercial music is controlled by four multinational firms, most music is made and enjoyed in diverse situations divorced from such corporate behemoths. These fourteen original essays examine the fascinating world of “music scenes,” those largely inconspicuous sites where clusters of musicians, producers, and fans explore their common musical tastes and distinctive lifestyle choices. Although most music scenes come and go with hardly a trace, they nevertheless give immense satisfaction to their participants, and a few—New York bop jazz, Merseybeat, Memphis rockabilly, London punk, Bronx hip-hop—achieve fame and spur musical innovations. To date, serious study of the scenes phenomenon has focused mainly on specific music scenes while paying less attention to recurrent dynamics of scene life, such as how individuals construct and negotiate scenes to the various activities. This volume remedies that neglect. The editors distinguish between three types of scenes—local, translocal, and virtual—which provide the organizing framework for the essays. Aspects of local scenes, which are confined to specific areas, are explored through essays on Chicago blues, rave, karaoke, teen pop, and salsa. The section on translocal scenes, which involve the coming together of scattered local scenes around a particular type of music and lifestyle, includes articles on Riot Grrrls, goths, art music, and anarcho-punk. Aspects of virtual scenes, in which fans communicate via the internet, are illustrated using alternative country, the Canterbury sound, post-rock, and Kate Bush fans. Also included is an essay that shows how the social conditions in places where jazz was made influenced that music’s development.

This volume, which includes essays on Catalonia, the Basque country, Galicia, and literature written by African immigrants, focuses on issues of "difference" that are at the center of current debates in Spain and elsewhere--the emergence of minoritized literatures, multilingualism and identity, new relationships between culture and institutions, the negotiation of historical memories, the connections between migrations and the redefinition of nationhood, and the impact of global trends on local symbolic systems.

Obesity costs our society billions of dollars a year in lost productivity and medical expenses, roughly half of which the federal government pays through Medicare and Medicaid. We know obesity plagues the poor more than the non-poor and poor women more than poor men. Poor women make up the majority of adult welfare recipients—coincidence or causal connection? This book investigates the controversial claim by welfare critics that public assistance programs like Food Stamps and the National School Lunch programs contribute to obesity among the poor. The author synthesizes empirical evidence from an array of disciplines—anthropology, economics, epidemiology, medicine, nutrition science, marketing, psychology, public health, sociology, and urban planning--to test this claim and to test whether other causal processes are at work. With a lucid presentation that makes it a model for applying research to questions of social policy, the book lays out the different hypotheses and the possible causal pathways within each. The four central chapters test whether “public assistance causes obesity,” “obesity causes public assistance,” “poverty causes both public assistance and obesity,” and “Factor X causes both.” The factors in the last category that may relate to both public assistance and obesity include stress, disability, and physical abuse.

On investigative visits to nursing homes across the nation, Beth Baker has witnessed profound changes. Culture change leaders are tearing up everything -- the floor plans, the flow charts, the schedules, the lousy menus, the attitudes, the rules -- and starting from scratch. They are creating extraordinary places where people live in dignity and greet the day with contentment, assisted by employees who feel valued and appreciated. Perhaps most surprising, these homes prove that a high quality of life does not have to cost more. Some of the best homes in the nation serve primarily low-income people who are on Medicaid. In this new book, Baker tell the story of a better way to live in old age. Although each home is different, they share common values: respecting individual choices; empowering staff; fostering a strong community of elders, staff, family members, and volunteers; redesigning buildings from a hospital model to a home (where pets and children are part of everyday life); and honoring people when they die. Her visits to more than two dozen facilities include those associatd with the Eden Alternative, Green House, Kendal, and the Pioneer Network. Whether these transformational homes become the norm or the domain of a lucky few is the question that faces the next generation of elders, the baby boomers.

“Truly a remarkable book. Not only does it contain a brief history and philosophy of consumer-operated programs in the mental health field but also hands-on examples of eight case studies from across the country as well as glossaries, contact lists and directories. Embedded within these programs are essential ingredients of empowerment, choice, respect for diversity, creativity, humor, and advocacy. Such components are critical for humans to reclaim their lives after serious and persisting challenges such as mental illnesses. This book illustrates the wide variety of ways people can help themselves by helping others.” --Courtenay M. Harding, Senior Director, Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation, Boston University On Our Own, Together looks in depth at eight successful peer-run programs for adults with serious mental illnesses. The book grew out of a 1998 meeting that led off a nationwide study to assess not only the effectiveness of consumer-operated services programs (COSPs) but also their implications for the future of mental health care in the United States. The book clusters the COSPs into three key types: drop-in centers, which provide varied services for their members, including meals, housing assistance, and stigma-free environments; educational programs, which train mental health consumers in recovery skills for themselves and for other consumers; and services based on peer support and mentoring. Despite their differences, the book shows, the programs share many essential characteristics. Most significantly, they demonstrate the benefits of allowing mental health consumers to operate and govern their own organizations. Also important is their emphasis on equality, mutuality, empowerment, recovery, belonging, and hope in administering services. Such core values, the book suggests, distinguish peer-run programs from the professional services that have long dominated the mental health system. In contrast to the dry, clinical reports that make up much of the current literature, this book is written "from the inside out" and, for the most part, by the people who developed the programs and who live them every day. It reveals peer-run programs as valuable resources within the mental health system and, indeed, a precious necessity for many consumers.

Juanita was seventeen years old and pregnant with her first child when she began an activity that would "open" her mind. Living in a remote Garifuna village in Honduras, Juanita had dropped out of school after the sixth grade. In 1996, a new educational program, Sistema de Aprendizaje Tutorial (Tutorial Learning System or SAT), was started in her community. The program helped her see the world differently and open a small business.

Empowering women through education has become a top priority of international development efforts. Erin MurphyGraham draws on more than a decade of qualitative research to examine the experiences of Juanita and eighteen other women who participated in the SAT program. Their narratives suggest the simple yet subtle ways education can spark the empowerment process, as well as the role of men and boys in promoting gender equality.

Drawing on indepth interviews and classroom observation in Honduras and Uganda, MurphyGraham shows the potential of the SAT program to empower women through expanded access and improved quality of secondary education in Latin America and Africa. An appendix provides samples of the classroom lessons.

Ordinary Enchantments investigates magical realism as the most important trend in contemporary international fiction, defines its characteristics and narrative techniques, and proposes a new theory to explain its significance. In the most comprehensive critical treatment of this literary mode to date, Wendy B. Faris discusses a rich array of examples from magical realist novels around the world, including the work not only of Latin American writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but also of authors like Salman Rushdie, Gunter Grass, Toni Morrison, and Ben Okri. Faris argues that by combining realistic representation with fantastic elements so that the marvelous seems to grow organically out of the ordinary, magical realism destabilizes the dominant form of realism based on empirical definitions of reality, gives it visionary power, and thus constitutes what might be called a "remystification" of narrative in the West. Noting the radical narrative heterogeneity of magical realism, the author compares its cultural role to that of traditional shamanic performance, which joins the worlds of daily life and that of the spirits. Because of that capacity to bridge different worlds, magical realism has served as an effective decolonizing agent, providing the ground for marginal voices, submerged traditions, and emergent literatures to develop and create masterpieces. At the same time, this process is not limited to postcolonial situations but constitutes a global trend that replenishes realism from within. In addition to describing what many consider to be the progressive cultural work of magical realism, Faris also confronts the recent accusation that magical realism and its study as a global phenomenon can be seen as a form of commodification and an imposition of cultural homogeneity. And finally, drawing on the narrative innovations and cultural scenarios that magical realism enacts, she extends those principles toward issues of gender and the possibility of a female element within magical realism.

Featuring many personal accounts, the twenty-four essays in this collection explore the challenges and possibilities confronting those, especially women, who combine parenting and academic work. Written by a diverse group of educators who present a real-world variety of situations, the collection also includes ideas for change at the individual, interpersonal, policy, and system levels.

Today George Peabody College is a part of Vanderbilt University, as it has been since its merger in 1979. Its prior history was rich and complex. In this book, Paul Conkin, author of the award-winning history of Vanderbilt, Gone with the Ivy, tells the story of Peabody's many lives, of its successes and failures, and of its many colorful leaders and professors.

It all began as a small frontier academy in 1785. The institution that would become Peabody experienced its first reinvention two decades later as it became Cumberland College, and then, in 1826, the University of Nashville. The University maintained an elite undergraduate college until 1850, and, despite the success of its medical school and a military institute, it failed in three subsequent efforts to restart its undergraduate program.

 

In 1875 the University offered its campus and degree-granting authority to the first normal school in the state of Tennessee, a school funded by the Peabody Education Fund. The Peabody Normal College was the best in the South, and, as such, exerted an enormous influence on education in the region.

 

A new era began in 1909. The trustees of the Peabody Fund, at its liquidation, provided an eventual $1.5 million to establish a graduate-level George Peabody College for Teachers. It opened for classes in 1914, on its present campus, where it quickly became the premier teachers' college in the South. As was the case with many private, independent institutions, Peabody faced intermittent financial struggles, which finally ended with its union with Vanderbilt. Today Peabody is, by almost any criteria, one of the five or six strongest colleges of education in the United States.

Peirce's Scientific Metaphysics is the first book devoted to understanding Charles Sanders Peirce's (1839-1914) metaphysics from the perspective of the scientific questions that motivated his thinking. Deftly situating Peirce's often original and pathbreaking ideas within their appropriate historical and scientific contexts, Reynolds traces his reliance upon the law of large numbers, which illustrated for Peirce the emergence of a stable order and regularity from a multitude of chance events, throughout his writings on late nineteenth-century physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and cosmology. Along the way, Peirce's vision of an indeterministic and evolutionary cosmology is contrasted with the thought of other important late nineteenth-century scientists and philosophers, such as James Clerk Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, and Ernst Haeckel. While offering a detailed account of the scientific ideas and theories essential for understanding Peirce's metaphysical system (e.g., the irreversibility of time and the reversibility of physical laws, the statistical law of large numbers), this book is written in a manner accessible to the non-specialist. This will make it especially attractive to students of Peirce's philosophy who lack familiarity with the scientific and mathematical ideas that are so central to his thought. Those with an interest in the history and philosophy of science, especially concerning the application of statistical and probabilistic thinking to physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and cosmology, will find this discussion of Peirce's philosophy invaluable. "Andrew Reynolds has written exactly the book we need, a clear, well-argued, scientifically informed study of Peirce's metaphysics. I wish it had been available well before now!"--Christopher Hookway, author of Peirce