Browse by title

For most college athletes, the end of their athletic career comes when their college eligibility runs out. While some college athletes will move seamlessly from being a college athlete to a career professional, many others struggle to adjust to life without sports. This book fills a gap in the sport retirement literature and adds to our understanding of what it means to leave sport. Steeped in scholarly literature and narrative inquiry research, the book reveals the complexity of a strong athletic identity developed over years of sport participation. Through narratives of former college athletes readers gain a deeper understanding of the emotions and challenges caused by leaving sports participation behind. The final chapters of the book provide strategies to improve the transition out of sport for college athletes. This book is useful for graduate programs that prepare academic advisors to work with college athletes or sports management programs with a course on intercollegiate athletic environments. The book is also useful reading for counselors, academic advisors, coaches, and parents of athletes at all levels of sport participation.

Communication and Contradiction in the NCAA: An Unlevel Playing Field is a critical examination of the contradictory nature of the NCAA, and how the inherent contradictions impact the communication activities of its constituents, supporters, and challengers. At the heart of the NCAA is the student-athlete, born out of an idealistic collection of communal values that is often at odds with institutional practices. The rhetorical negotiation of the student-athlete’s identity informs and confuses communication practices on a number of levels, from interpersonal interactions to organizational apologia. Because the student-athlete is critical to maintaining the collegiate athletics orientation, the NCAA works overtime in promoting, maintaining, and defending it in the face of public scrutiny. The NCAA and its member institutions, like any organization, are compelled to answer public accusations, often working to defend inconsistent policies to an increasingly hostile audience. In an effort to solidify its power, the NCAA uses public discourse to maintain its position by establishing and enforcing proper codes of conduct for participants, and rationalizing unfair labor practices, athletics budgets, and rising tuition costs designed to boost athletics. In response they often rely on familiar rhetorical and organizational practices, such as branding, mascots, and heroic stories of student-athletes, all of which come with issues of their own. All of these communication phenomena, from interpersonal support-seeking to organizational scapegoating, are informed by the central student-athlete mythos. This puts the NCAA at a contradictory crossroads as they work to reconcile inconsistent practices and messages.

This edited volume investigates the role of digital communication in relation to linguistic diversity and language education in today’s digitally networked world. It aims to examine (1) how language(s) are (re)contextualized and (re)localized concerning other languages, multimodalities, semiotic resources, genres, and repertoires in various domains of digital communication and (2) what pragmatic functions digital communication may serve in terms of language education – both in and out of classroom – and pedagogy. The collection includes contributions exploring diverse digital venues in which language has multiple different roles and functions, illustrating micro- and macro-linguistic practices in varied areas of society, including education, politics, technology, media, and popular culture.

This book pays tribute to an intellectual giant. The twenty-one succinct chapters comprising the volume, and the variety of scholars who have authored them, are indicative of his intellectual, geographical and intergenerational reach. These chapters reflect the towering influence of Roger Dale’s work in fields such as the Sociology of Education, Globalization and Education Policy Studies, and Comparative and International Education. While engaging critically with Roger’s intellectual ideas—and without exception the authors demonstrate the significance of these to their own theoretical and research endeavors—they also include personal reflections on his role as mentor, role model, networker, and friend. Together the chapters are testimony to the richness, quality and diversity of Roger Dale’s work and the extent to which it has inspired several generations of scholars from very different world locations. In a final chapter, Roger Dale himself responds from his usual humble position to all contributors and reviews the key aspects of an exceptional and ongoing intellectual journey.

The goal of this book is to suggest that Jesus as a creative artist was heavily influenced by the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Proverbs. It posits that he created some of his short parables from specific verses found in Proverbs, suggests that he expanded some basic sapient themes present in this book when composing his parables, and shows him reacting negatively to the commonly held belief that this Book’s overall concept of wisdom is that the wise are rewarded and the fools are punished by God through their own self-destructive choices and subsequent actions.

Thus this text points to Jesus as an inventive artist, a concept not usually associated with him, and it complicates simplistic ways of defining biblical wisdom. Part I demonstrates how Jesus might have created his tales from specific proverbs found in the Book of Proverbs. The overarching theme for these parables is wisdom: Jesus as wisdom (I Cor. 1:24) speaking wisdom in new ways.

Part II discusses Jesus as a self-actualized artist who creatively designed these tales. It examines what shaped Jesus’ artistry, what might have been the sources of his literacy, why he might have chosen to expand individual proverbs imaginatively in order to create his moral tales, and how his wisdom enhanced conventional attitudes toward wisdom as the former included and clarified his new "kingdom of God" concepts.

This book could be used in courses treating Literature and the Bible, Biblical Art, The Humanity of Jesus, and Wisdom Literature Common to Christians and Jews.

This edited book aims at bringing together a range of contemporary expertise that can shed light on the relationship between media pluralism in Latin America and processes of democratization and social justice. In doing so, the authors of the book provide empirically grounded theoretical insight into the extent to which questions about media pluralism—broadly understood as the striving for diverse and inclusive media spheres—are an essential part of scholarly debates on democratic governance.

The rise in recent years of authoritarianism, populism and nationalism, both in fragile and stable democratic systems, makes media pluralism an intellectual and empirical cornerstone of any debate about the future of democratic governance around the world. This book—useful for students and researchers on topics such as Media, Communications, Latin American Studies and Politics—aims to make a contribution to such debate by approaching some pressing questions about the relationship of Latin American governments with media structures, journalistic practices, the communication capabilities of vulnerable populations and the expressive opportunities of the general public.

When we think about the "pictures in our heads" that media create and perpetuate, what images are we truly referencing? Issues of media stereotypes and representation (both past and present) are crucial to advancing media literacy. Media Stereotypes: From Ageism to Xenophobia becomes one-stop shopping for synthesizing what we know within the composite of stereotyping research in the United States. Utilizing a cast of top American scholars with deep roots in asking stereotype-based questions, this book is essential reading for those wishing to understand what we know about past and present media representations as well as those wishing to take the baton and continue to advance media stereotyping research in the future.