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Investigating the nature of Chinese modernity from the perspectives of social and intellectual history and inspired by Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, my book intends to reveal the ambiguity of nation as a modern concept and thereupon open up a new possibility for the turn of China’s national narratives. As it turns out, the definitions of nation as either an imagined community or an entity with a substantive cultural origin are both partially wrong in the Chinese context, since China had its distinctive socio-cultural system in pre-modern times and the binary mode of nationality is inadequate to interpret the complexity of Chinese society. In light of this complexity, this work explores the relationship between the Manchus and the Han Chinese throughout the Qing dynasty, examines the transmission and reproduction of modern knowledge, particularly that of race and nation, on the ground of China’s reactions to the Western influence, and discusses how the supra-nationalist discourse of various religions succumbed to the homogenizing nature of nation state in modern China. To depict a general picture of "Chinese modernity" and avoid the risk of oversimplification, I combine the methodology of social history with that of intellectual history in this book, abandoning the East-West binary opposition and grouping all ten chapters into three parts that respectively approach Chinese modernity from a specific perspective. On this basis, it can be concluded that Chinese modernity, as a form of new knowledge, is produced out of the combination of a forward-thinking viewpoint and a fantasy about the modern age, which constitutes an inevitable path to China’s "national liberation" from the entanglement of ethnicity and cultural traditions.

As demographics change and the southern American region grows more multicultural, clashes between mentalities and contemporary population realties increase. Somalis in the Neo-South: African Immigration, Politics and Race offers a balanced and insightful look at Somalis in the southern United States. Politically centered, it is a thought-provoking book that presents an essential and positive alternative to the familiar portrayal of Somalis in the U.S. as terrorists. It explains the U.S. resettlement process and illuminates the civic engagement and entrepreneurship of Somalis in Clarkston, Georgia, and Nashville, Tennessee.

This book is the first monograph on interpreting issues related to Taiwan Sign Language (TSL). TSL is the language used amongst deaf communities in Taiwan. As far as interpreting from and into TSL is concerned, there are numerous issues and inadequacies to be tackled in terms of the professional identity and the services provided. Research on this issue is crucial because it aims at raising the self-awareness of TSL interpreters and the quality of the interpretation itself. The results of this research monograph have implications for sign language interpreting in regard to research, pedagogy and practice, insofar as they raise the awareness of one’s own professional figure. This seems to be a crucial deontological factor in any discussion related to interpreting rights.

According to Kenneth Burke, every idea houses its opposite. "Heresies and orthodoxies will always be changing places," he imagined, "but whatever the minority view happens to be at any given time, one must consider it as 'counter.'" In other words, every tradition contains its own critique. Ideas are always in dialogue, bridging gaps that we may not have known existed until the bridges were built. And alongside those bridges are other implied ways to transfer and create meaning. To foreground that pendulum and address our contemporary political climate, White Nationalism and Faith: Statements and Counter-Statements on American Identity includes American texts which wield religious arguments in order to affirm or dismantle white supremacy. William Jennings Bryan, Billy Sunday, and Bob Jones as well as Barack Obama, Phil Snider, and Mitch Landrieu are just a few of the voices in dialogue. This anthology is designed for the upper-level undergraduate or master's student so that they can explore how American rhetors since the Civil War have constituted their white nationalism through religious rhetoric. With this anthology of statements and their contemporaneous counter-statements, the authors to craft and polish the same serious but comedic lens as Kenneth Burke imagined in the twentieth century.

There was a time when the word "modern" would not have appeared in folklore scholarship in general and in proverb studies in particular. After all, folklorists and cultural historians were primarily interested in traditional materials with some consideration also being given to their innovative adaptations. While this interplay of tradition and innovation informed many studies that exemplified a certain constancy in change, little attention was paid to new or modern folklore items. But there has been a revolutionary change during the past few decades in that scholars have looked at the creation of new folklore. This change of emphasis has also influenced paremiographers (proverb collectors) and paremiologists (proverb scholars). In fact, the Dictionary of Modern Proverbs (2012) edited by Charles Clay Doyle, Wolfgang Mieder, and Fred R. Shapiro has become solid proof that there is such a phenomenon as modern proverbs.

This is the first study of authentic modern American proverbs without including proverbs of British origin. The first of nine chapters discusses the origin, nature, and meaning of modern American proverbs based on about 1500 texts. The next large chapter contains a general overview of their forward-looking message that includes the American spirit of mobility with its emphasis toward a successful and exciting future. The third chapter treats proverbial emotions about modern life, with the fourth chapter considering the modern wisdom about age and aging. The next two chapters cover somatic aspects of these proverbs and also the preoccupation with time. This is followed by a discussion about pecuniary proverbs that reflect the attitudes of a capitalistic society. The next chapter shows that modern proverbs continue to include references to animals as has been the case with older proverbs. Finally, there is the ninth chapter about sexuality and scatology in modern proverbs, indicating that these topics play a considerable role in this modern wisdom. Such proverbs were often excluded form proverb collections. With the much greater openness about love, sex, and various taboos, proverbs have become much more open literally or figuratively about these matters that are an obsession of sorts throughout the society. Altogether these nine chapters with their many modern American proverbs present a fascinating metaphorical picture of a general of composite American worldview.

Autoethnography in Undergraduate Writing Courses blends narrative and analysis in an engaging and applicable account of how the genre of autoethnography can be a valuable addition or alternative to traditional research assignments.

Many writing teachers struggle to motivate and equip students to conduct meaningful and effective research. Practicing autoethnography—the scholarly combination of personal reflection, artistic representation, and social/cultural research—provides an opportunity for students to research and write about something that genuinely interests them: their own experiences.

A genre of personal writing, autoethnography is comparable to pedagogy pioneered by expressivists like Donald Murray, Peter Elbow, and Wendy Bishop, among others. However, combining personal writing with research—as autoethnography does—is more rare. Some compositionists have already used autoethnography in their own research and teaching, but this book demonstrates why more compositionists should consider adopting autoethnography into their pedagogy.

The author shares his own experience teaching autoethnography at the undergraduate level, modeling its potential and demonstrating its impact. Written in a lively, conversational voice, the book presents substantial qualitative research, including samples of student writing, supplemented by student interviews and surveys.

These data indicate that practicing autoethnography can have unusually, if not uniquely, positive effects on students’ lives. Specifically, the author identifies and illustrates eight outcomes of practicing autoethnography: increased reflexivity, improved research and writing skills, greater awareness of ethical issues, critical empowerment, therapeutic catharsis, enjoyment, and the development of a sense of community.

In the final decades of the 20th century, a confluence of factors precipitated a policy change in the criminal justice arena that led to unprecedented growth. This growth translated into the criminalization, sentencing and incarceration of tens of thousands of marginalized people in the United States. These factors are considered in Behind American Prison Policy and Population Growth: An Inside Account. Tales are told of the increased prison population that necessitated a continuous unfolding of prison construction projects, rehabbing abandoned state hospitals and private prisons, all with the aim of more and more secure accommodations. During this time, the author was a participant/observer at all correctional security levels, treatment and medical facilities and personnel training in this system. His roles over the years included increased responsibility and regular direct contact with incarcerated individuals in on-the-line or line supervisor positions. The narrative is enhanced by the author's background as social science scholar. This is a unique perspective, documenting a historic upturn in long-term detention addressing crime and disorder. These overarching realities produced struggle across all participants, including clients, staff, consultants and visitors. Their stories of being swept up in the constant demand for increasing capacity offer compelling background to the consequences of visceral responses guiding criminal justice.

Catholic Sexual Pathology and the Western Mind: The Ancient Era, Vol. 1 documents with historical and clinical data the correlation between Catholic sexual orthodoxy and Catholic sexual pathology. The Roman church government replaced the sex positive Hebrew Tradition, which integrated the love of women and sex in Judaism with a sex negative Christian Tradition, which integrated the hatred of women and sex in church doctrine. Jesus followed the sex positive holistic Hebrew Tradition rather than the sex negative dualistic Christian Tradition. Across 2000 years of Christian tradition Catholic sex negative doctrines, morals, laws and practices enforced by an authoritarian rather than democratic Roman church system allegedly caused mass human suffering and damage in both the Catholic Mind and the Western Mind. Using a multidisciplinary methodology the book traces a faulty sexual anthropology historically and culturally rooted in various pagan Greek, Roman and Persian sexual dualisms, which became Catholic sexual orthodoxy and which became a terminal cancer in both the Catholic Mind and the Western Mind. The book, while using extensive resources and annotated endnotes, is an interdisciplinary intellectual exercise, which examines Catholic sexual pathology through the lens of history, theology, philosophy, law, medicine, sexology, psychology, psychiatry, sociology and anthropology, while using the scientific method.The book represents a pioneer effort across a 50 year span to examine the review of literature and to empirically document the mass human suffering and damage caused by Catholic sexual orthodoxy in both the Catholic Mind and the Western Mind.

Cinema Derrida charts Jacques Derrida's collaborations and appearances in film, video, and television beginning with 1983's Ghost Dance (dir. Ken McMullen, West Germany/UK) and ending with 2002's biographical documentary Derrida (dir. Dick and Ziering, USA). In the last half of his working life, Derrida embraced popular art forms and media in more ways than one: not only did he start making more media appearances after years of refusing to have his photo taken in the 1960s and 1970s, but his philosophy also started to draw more explicitly from visual culture and artistic endeavours. While this book offers explanations of this transition, it contends the image of "Jacques Derrida" that emerges from film and TV appearances remains spectral, constantly deferring a complete grasp of him.

Tyson Stewart draws out the main tenets of spectrality from Derrida's seminal texts Of Grammatology and Specters of Marx and other writings, like Echographies of Television, in order to fill a gap in studies of Derrida and film. Throughout the book, he explains how various techniques and spectral effects such as slow motion, stillness, repetition, mise-en-abîme, direct address, and focus on body parts/bodily presence bring about a structure of spectrality wherein the past other returns to make impressions and ethical demands on the viewer. Drawing on communication theory and film and media studies, Cinema Derrida makes a major intervention in classical communication thought.

Conquering Trauma and Anxiety to Find Happiness offers trauma victims suffering from anxiety and other disorders freedom from continued emotional suffering. National mental health statistics state 60% of adults, approximately 150,000,000 people, report experiencing trauma. The National Institute of Mental health states 42,000,000 American adults live with an anxiety disorder often resulting from trauma. Through this book’s focus on affect theory and affect labeling, these millions of traumatized and anxious individuals learn to stop living with chronic stress and their reactive, inflexible, and rigid responses to life.

This book offers affect theory as a biological explanation to the consequences of living as a trauma victim by understanding what happened to them and repairing the harm. Affect theory presents nine biologically-coded affects to explain emotion, motivation, behavior, and personality with two positive, one neutral, and six negative affects. Stimulus from our environment activates an affect and its preprogrammed responses within our brain and body. Through facial expressions, along with other physical manifestations, we understand when an affect activates to help us understand our feelings.

Another intervention featured in this book, affect labeling or putting feelings into words, encourages us to focus attention in the present moment to read our body’s sensory information and integrate our brain and mind. Trauma victims understand how therapy provides an important intervention for recovery. An affect management system offers various interventions, such as diet and exercise, to overcome the consequences of trauma and anxiety. We no longer need to suffer if we experience trauma and anxiety.