Brain Plasticity and Learning


Book Description

This book synthesizes the latest findings on neuroplasticity and learning, drawing on rich phenomenological research carried out with teachers, psychologists, parents and students from around the world to examine the implications for current teaching and for the advancement of learning methods. Building on the author’s previous work in this area, the volume considers in depth the function of feelings and emotions in neuroplastic cognition, and provides an analysis of curriculum debates and assessment systems in the light of neuroplasticity. The final chapters explore the implications of brain plasticity outside of structured learning environments and in society at large. The book will appeal to students and scholars of psychology and education, as well as to educational psychologists, coaches, teachers and educational leaders.




Raised in Pimp City: The Uncut Truth About Domestic Human Sex Trafficking


Book Description

"You pimp! You trafficker! You should be skinned alive and burned at the stake! How could you possibly exploit another sexually for your own sick financial gain? They were prostituting minors! How could they be so sick? Prison, yes prison should be where we hide you forever for the destruction of human life that you caused. Stopping you means stopping the human sex trafficking epidemic! If we incarcerate you we can stop modern day slavery!"I heard these words as I watched a group of my mentees go through their case in federal court. With RICO conspiracy charges hanging over their heads, they were presented as gang members that trafficked girls for the benefit of the gang. I knew these allegations were false. I knew these young men personally. They were not pimps and definitely not "traffickers," a new word to me that I had never heard before until now. A word that I had to learn the meaning of fast. How did I know that they weren't "traffickers"? I quickly found out that for many years of my life I myself was a trafficker.I sat in the courtroom silent, not able to speak my first-hand knowledge of "the game." Regardless of whether I knew my mentees were innocent or not, these were charges they could never shake. I listened as law enforcement experts testified from their expertise. Ha! What did they know? These were people who had never spent a single day in the subculture of pimping and prostitution. They had no clue what that life was really like and if they did they were lying on purpose to continue the mass incarceration of young black and brown lives. Yeah, that had to be it.Entering the anti human sex trafficking movement as a former pimp and trafficker, I knew I would be alone. My past will not be taken well by many, but what other option do I have, stay quiet? Should I not educate people about domestic human sex trafficking and the pimping culture I was raised to believe was my only way of success? I can't stay quiet! I can't go off and live a normal life, glad to have survived the game. Out of 8 of my closest friends I am one of 4 still alive. The only way to help end this cycle of death and incarceration is to teach the truth from my perspective. All sides of this problem must be at the table because so far only a portion of the story is being told. This portion of the story still doesn't truly reflect the lived realities of the many women survivors that I know and love. Staying quiet is not an option for me - I'm willing to die to save future generations from this trap. This was no "game" we were playing. It was an illusion. An illusion that was pressed upon me and my entire peer group as we grew up in San Diego, California. Pimp City.To all who want to truly want to help fight human sex trafficking and sexual exploitation this book is needed in your arsenal.This is not a "how to" book on pimping. This is also not a book about human sex trafficking in general. This book presents a deeper understanding of the mind-frame and make-up of those involved in human sex trafficking. This book specifically deals with the pimping and prostitution subculture that has risen from impoverished communities across the United States, communities in cities like mine. This subculture can affect your family no matter what social or economic class you come from. Do you want to learn the truth so that we can really deal with the problem? Here's your opportunity.




Our Enemies in Blue


Book Description

Let's begin with the basics: violence is an inherent part of policing. The police represent the most direct means by which the state imposes its will on the citizenry. They are armed, trained, and authorized to use force. Like the possibility of arrest, the threat of violence is implicit in every police encounter. Violence, as well as the law, is what they represent. Using media reports alone, the Cato Institute's last annual study listed nearly seven thousand victims of police "misconduct" in the United States. But such stories of police brutality only scratch the surface of a national epidemic. Every year, tens of thousands are framed, blackmailed, beaten, sexually assaulted, or killed by cops. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on civil judgments and settlements annually. Individual lives, families, and communities are destroyed. In this extensively revised and updated edition of his seminal study of policing in the United States, Kristian Williams shows that police brutality isn't an anomaly, but is built into the very meaning of law enforcement in the United States. From antebellum slave patrols to today's unarmed youth being gunned down in the streets, "peace keepers" have always used force to shape behavior, repress dissent, and defend the powerful. Our Enemies in Blue is a well-researched page-turner that both makes historical sense of this legalized social pathology and maps out possible alternatives.




Beyond Feelings


Book Description

This succinct, interdisciplinary introduction to critical reasoning successfully dares students to question their own assumptions and to enlarge their thinking world through the analysis of the most common problems associated with everyday reasoning. The text offers a unique and effective organization: Part I explains the fundamental concepts; Part II describes the most common barriers to critical thinking; Part III offers strategies for overcoming those barriers; Part IV offers a selection of contemporary issues that invite students to practice their skills.




Third Party Sex Work and Pimps in the Age of Anti-trafficking


Book Description

This volume is a compilation of new original qualitative and ethnographic research on pimps and other third party facilitators of commercial sex from the developed and developing world. From African-American pimps in the United States and Eastern European migrants in Germany to Brazilian cafetãos and cafetinas this volume features the lives and voices of the men and women who enable diverse and culturally distinct sex markets around the world. In scholarly, popular, and policy-making discourses, such individuals are typically viewed as larger-than-life hustlers, violent predators, and brutal exploiters. However, there is actually very little empirical research-based knowledge about how pimps and third party facilitators actually live, labor, and make meaning in their everyday lives. Nearly all previous knowledge derives from hearsay and post-hoc reporting from ex-sex-workers, customers, police and government agents, neighbors, and self-aggrandizing fictionalized memoirs. This volume is the first published compilation of empirically researched data and analysis about pimps and third parties working in the sex trade across the globe. Situated in an age of highly punitive and ubiquitous global anti-trafficking law, it challenges highly charged public policy stereotypes that conflate pimping and sex trafficking, in order to understand the lived experience of pimps and the men and women whose work they facilitate.




Prison Sexual Violence


Book Description

This study examines prison sexual violence in adult and juvenile New York State prisons. To an inmate, the formal structure of a prison – its planned work, recreation, and rehabilitation – may be a thin veneer. The ‘real’ world is the social environment, created by the convict community, and sexual violence is a traditional part of that environment. A range of sexual behaviors, all perceived as threatening and offensive by the targets of aggressors were examined, with discussion on the nature of the overture, the physical and verbal response of the target, his thoughts and feelings, the living patterns resulting from sexual pressure, and how peers and staff react. In this population, sexual aggression is shown to be racially-based: most aggressors were black, and most victims were white, of a slighter build than the aggressor, and perceived as having feminine physical and personality characteristics. About half of the 152 incidents examined involved physical violence, half initiated by aggressors coercing targets; the rest from targets reacting to threats. Both aggressors and targets tended to come from outside and prison social subcultures which used aggression as a primary means of relieving frustration and irritation. After fights, targets reported that aggressors left them alone, that they moved around the prison with less fear, felt better about themselves, and had a higher status among other prisoners. Sexual attacks increased fear, and victims continued to be affected emotionally months after the event. Prison staff did not usually intervene directly in the incidents, nor is there evidence that such intervention would be effective in reducing the problem. The author recommends the provision of program alternatives such as the Alternatives to Violence (AVP) and other conflict resolutions programs. (NCJRS, modified).




Criminology Goes to the Movies


Book Description

From a look at classics like Psycho and Double Indemnity to recent films like Traffic and Thelma & Louise, Nicole Rafter and Michelle Brown show that criminological theory is produced not only in the academy, through scholarly research, but also in popular culture, through film. Criminology Goes to the Movies connects with ways in which students are already thinking criminologically through engagements with popular culture, encouraging them to use the everyday world as a vehicle for theorizing and understanding both crime and perceptions of criminality. The first work to bring a systematic and sophisticated criminological perspective to bear on crime films, Rafter and Brown's book provides a fresh way of looking at cinema, using the concepts and analytical tools of criminology to uncover previously unnoticed meanings in film, ultimately making the study of criminological theory more engaging and effective for students while simultaneously demonstrating how theories of crime circulate in our mass-mediated worlds. The result is an illuminating new way of seeing movies and a delightful way of learning about criminology.




The Film Appreciation Book


Book Description

This is a book for cinephiles, pure and simple. Author and filmmaker, Jim Piper, shares his vast knowledge of film and analyzes the most striking components of the best movies ever made. From directing to cinematography, from editing and music to symbolism and plot development, The Film Appreciation Book covers hundreds of the greatest works in cinema, combining history, technical knowledge, and the art of enjoyment to explain why some movies have become the most treasured and entertaining works ever available to the public, and why these movies continue to amaze viewers after decades of notoriety. Read about such classic cinematic masterpieces as Citizen Kane, Gandhi, Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, True Grit, Gone With the Wind, and The Wizard of Oz, as well as more recent accomplishments in feature films, such as Requiem for a Dream, Munich, The King’s Speech, and The Hurt Locker. Piper breaks down his analysis for you and points out aspects of production that movie-lovers (even the devoted ones) would never recognize on their own. This book will endlessly fascinate, and by the time you get to the last chapter, you’re ready to start all over again. In-depth analysis and thoughtful and wide-ranging film choices from every period of cinema history will ensure that you never tire of this reading companion to film. Allworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, publishes a broad range of books on the visual and performing arts, with emphasis on the business of art. Our titles cover subjects such as graphic design, theater, branding, fine art, photography, interior design, writing, acting, film, how to start careers, business and legal forms, business practices, and more. While we don't aspire to publish a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are deeply committed to quality books that help creative professionals succeed and thrive. We often publish in areas overlooked by other publishers and welcome the author whose expertise can help our audience of readers.




Anthropological Explorations in Queer Theory


Book Description

Anthropological Explorations in Queer Theory offers a wide ranging fusion of queer theory with anthropological theory, shifting away from the discussion of gender categories and identities that have often constituted a central concern of queer theory and instead exploring the queer elements of contexts in which they are not normally apparent. Engaging with a number of apparently 'non-sexual' topics, including embodiment and fieldwork, regimes of value, gifts and commodities, diversity discourses, biological essentialisms, intersectionality, the philosophy of Bergson and Deleuze, and the representation of heterosexuality in popular culture, this book moves to discuss central concerns of contemporary anthropology, drawing on both the latest anthropological research as well as classic theories. In broadening the field of queer anthropology and opening queer theory to a number of new themes, both empirical and theoretical, Anthropological Explorations in Queer Theory will appeal not only to anthropologists and queer theorists, but also to geographers and sociologists concerned with questions of ontology, materiality and gender and sexuality.




Free from Civilization


Book Description

In clear, impassioned prose, Enrico Manicardi analyzes the evils of our age from their genesis. This or that economic, technological or cultural model is not to blame for our current crisis; the blame lies with economics, technology and culture as such. It is the ideology of fear that makes us afraid. It is the mentality of domination that jeopardizes all of our relationships. In short, the problem is civilization. Through its oppressive classes, values and processes that pervade everyone's life, civilization domesticates us, weakens our perceptiveness and distances us from the living world. We must radically change our way of thinking, feeling and behaving before it's too late-we must dam the flood of devitalization that is washing over us, and return to our wilder natures, both inside and outside ourselves. Manicardi's appeal is crystal clear: if we are to survive we must begin to search inside ourselves, not to celebrate the distant past as if it were a cult, but to return to ourselves, to grip life with our own two hands, and build upon that earlier ecocentric conscience which once held the place of the egocentric conscience now leading us astray. Enrico Manicardi was born in 1966 and is a member of La Scintilla, the Society for Libertarian Culture of Modena. A lawyer and founder of the antiauthoritarian media project "Infection," he has also played guitar and written music for an eponymous band since the 1980s. His lifelong wish has been to live in a free, radically off-kilter, ecologically sound world, one characterized by warm, spontaneous, non-hierarchical relationships rather than those consecrated by the cult of technology. Troubled by the way people have succumbed to a civilization that estranges, domesticates and regulates everything and everyone, he continues to protest against the modern world's project to enslave us. This book augurs the rise of an increasingly harmonious chorus loud enough to put an end to that project.