Compelling Engagements


Book Description

After decades of rape law reform, it is still being argued that the criminal justice system fails rape victims, that too few cases are prosecuted and too few prosecutions result in conviction. Compelling Engagements is a ground-breaking work which investigates the narratives of rape law and of romance fiction, and explores the outmoded and strikingly similar depictions of their normative female subjects. These are women who are not only vulnerable but also evidently worthy of the protections or rewards promised: punishment of the rapist or the hero's love. Larcombe's analysis explores: the definitions of "rape" in the criminal law and "romance" in Harlequin Mills and Boon fiction; the feminine subjects represented in the texts of rape law and romance fiction; the feminised subject positions the texts produce: the rape complainant and the romance reader; particular fictionalisations of the rape complainant and the romance reader: the false rape complainant and the ideal romance consumer; and how these fictionalisations serve the interests of the criminal justice system and the romance publishing industry. Larcombe shows how the legal construction of gender and subjectivity in rape law is still working to disempower victims. She suggests feminism's failure to accommodate women's investment in heroines of romance fiction has limited their effectiveness in transforming rape law. Compelling Engagements is an original and engaging analysis, and fascinating reading for anyone who deals with rape as part of the criminal justice system.




The Engagements


Book Description

A People Magazine Top 10 Best Books of the Year • The New York Times best-selling author of Maine returns with an exhilarating novel about Frances Gerety, the real pioneering ad woman who coined the famous slogan “A Diamond is Forever,” and four unique marriages that will test how true—or not—those words might be. "Sullivan is a born storyteller. Like its mineral muse, Engagements shines."—Entertainment Weekly Evelyn has been married to her husband for forty years, but their son’s messy divorce has put them at rare odds; James, a beleaguered paramedic, has spent most of his marriage haunted by his wife’s family’s expectations; Delphine has thrown caution to the wind and left a peaceful French life for an exciting but rocky romance in America; and Kate, partnered with Dan for a decade, has seen every kind of wedding and has vowed never, ever, to have one of her own. As the stories connect to each other and to Frances’s legacy in surprising ways, The Engagements explores the complicated ins and outs of relationships, then, now, and forever.




The Three Christs of Ypsilanti


Book Description

On July 1, 1959, at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan, the social psychologist Milton Rokeach brought together three paranoid schizophrenics: Clyde Benson, an elderly farmer and alcoholic; Joseph Cassel, a failed writer who was institutionalized after increasingly violent behavior toward his family; and Leon Gabor, a college dropout and veteran of World War II. The men had one thing in common: each believed himself to be Jesus Christ. Their extraordinary meeting and the two years they spent in one another’s company serves as the basis for an investigation into the nature of human identity, belief, and delusion that is poignant, amusing, and at times disturbing. Displaying the sympathy and subtlety of a gifted novelist, Rokeach draws us into the lives of three troubled and profoundly different men who find themselves “confronted with the ultimate contradiction conceivable for human beings: more than one person claiming the same identity.”




MAGIC


Book Description

A Five-part Approach to Making Organizations Stronger, More Profitable, and Better Places to Work. Employees and leaders intuitively know that when we find a place where we can throw our hearts, spirits, minds, and hands into our work, we are happier, healthier, and produce better results. Yet, most struggle to understand exactly why we engage in some environments, and don’t in others. Magic introduces the five MAGIC keys of employee engagement—Meaning, Autonomy, Growth, Impact, and Connection—and shows how leaders can help employees achieve higher levels of engagement, as well as how employees can be more successful by taking ownership for their own MAGIC. The Research Based on over 14 million employee survey responses across 70 countries—the most extensive employee engagement survey database of its kind—Magic combines principles of psychology and motivation with solid business concepts. Written by internationally recognized experts in leadership and employee engagement, Dr. Tracy Maylett and Dr. Paul Warner, Magic provides actionable advice that will reduce employee attrition, encourage initiative, drive growth and profit, and increase personal engagement in one’s work. Engaging Content In this book, leaders and employees will find real-world case studies, exercises, assessments, thought-provoking questions, and suggestions that increase engagement on the individual, manager, and organizational levels.




Customer Engagement


Book Description

How customers and consumer behavior have been changing due to technology and other forces is of prime interest. This book addresses the central questions regarding new emerging consumer behavior; how does social media affect this behavior; how and at what points do emotions affect consumer decisions; and what triggers this is: How should engagement be conceptualized, defined and measured? How do social media and other marketing activities create engagement? The book draws on the rich, extensive knowledge of the authors who are pioneers in the field. The book's editors have identified the weakness in the current knowledge and aim to address this gap by touching on significant conceptual and empirical contributions to this emerging literature stream, providing readers with a comprehensive contemporary perspective of customer engagement. The book also endeavors to develop a richer narrative around the notion of social media and customer engagement, and the non-monetary notion of social media within new media-based social networks.




Reading Words into Worlds


Book Description

Reading Words into Worlds asks how it is that reading a novel can feel in some ways like being-in-a-world. The book explores how novels give themselves to readers in ways that mimetically resemble our phenomenological reception of given beings in reality. McReynolds refers to this process as phenomenological mimesis of givenness, and he draws on the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl, Heidegger, and Jean-Luc Marion to explore how masterful novels can make reading ink marks on a page feel like seeing things, feeling things, and meeting (even loving) others. McReynolds blends rigorous phenomenological study with a personable style, first laying out his theory in detail and then applying that theory through close studies of his reading experiences of four British realist masterpieces: Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. Ultimately, this book offers a grounded phenomenology of novel-reading, illuminating what gives novels such power to not only thrill readers—but to change them.




The Bengal Code


Book Description




The Problem of Pleasure


Book Description

The tourism and leisure industries are big business. Opportunities for leisure and tourism have escalated as disposable income, technology, travel and education have become increasingly available in recent times. However, this trend has been juxtaposed with an increase in crime, particularly since the early the 1950s. Acquisitive crimes have been facilitated with the development of more portable and valuable commodities; some activities, such as drink driving and disorder, have now been socially defined as crimes and are more readily identified through new technology such as the increasing use of CCTV. The Problem of Pleasure covers them all. The purpose of this book is to inform and enlighten a range of readers, whose interests may be academic or commercial on possible crime events and modus operandi of criminals. The book has a global perspective, bringing together leading academics from the UK, the US, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand who examine several aspects of leisure that are vulnerable to crime, from illegal hunting to street racing, as well as the impact of crime upon tourists and the tourism industry. This book will be a key text for students of tourism and leisure as well as criminology and sociology; people working in the tourism and recreation industry; policy makers and the police.




Teaching Civics Today: The iCivics Approach to Classroom Innovation and Student Engagement


Book Description

Learn how to teach civics in today’s classrooms! This professional book explores key civics topics and offers strategies for incorporating civics into social studies class. Developed in partnership with civic education expert iCivics, this teacher resource provides strategies that build civics knowledge, develop 21st century skills, and engage students. Bring civics into the social studies classroom in a fun, meaningful way with this teacher-friendly book!




Deus in Machina:Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between


Book Description

The essays in this volume explore how two domains of human experience and action--religion and technology--are implicated in each other. Contrary to commonsense understandings of both religion (as an "otherworldly" orientation) and technology (as the name for tools, techniques, and expert knowledges oriented to "this" world), the contributors to this volume challenge the grounds on which this division has been erected in the first place. What sorts of things come to light when one allows religion and technology to mingle freely? In an effort to answer that question, Deus in Machina embarks upon an interdisciplinary voyage across diverse traditions and contexts where religion and technology meet: from the design of clocks in medieval Christian Europe, to the healing power of prayer in premodern Buddhist Japan, to 19th-century Spiritualist devices for communicating with the dead, to Islamic debates about kidney dialysis in contemporary Egypt, to the work of disability activists using documentary film to reimagine Jewish kinship, to the representation of Haitian Vodou on the Internet, among other case studies. Combining rich historical and ethnographic detail with extended theoretical reflection, Deus in Machina outlines new directions for the study of religion and/as technology that will resonate across the human sciences, including religious studies, science and technology studies, communication studies, history, anthropology, and philosophy.