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Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory
by Cristina Mejia VisperasHonorable Mention, Rachel Carson Prize, given by the Society for the Social Studies of ScienceFinalist, 2023 ASAP Book Award, given by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the PresentStudies the intersections of incarceration, medical science, and race in postwar AmericaIn February 1966, a local newspaper described the medical science program at Holmesburg Prison, Philadelphia, a “golden opportunity to conduct widespread medical tests under perfect control conditions.” Helmed by Albert M. Kligman, a University of Pennsylvania professor, these tests enrolled hundreds of the prison’s predominantly Black population in studies determining the efficacy and safety of a wide variety of substances, from common household products to chemical warfare agents. These experiments at Holmesburg were hardly unique; in the postwar United States, the use of incarcerated test subjects was standard practice among many research institutions and pharmaceutical companies. Skin Theory examines the prison as this space for scientific knowledge production, showing how the “perfect control conditions” of the prison dovetailed into the visual regimes of laboratory work. To that end, Skin Theory offers an important reframing of visual approaches to race in histories of science, medicine, and technology, shifting from issues of scientific racism to the scientific rationality of racism itself. In this highly original work, Cristina Mejia Visperas approaches science as a fundamentally racial project by analyzing the privileged object and instrument of Kligman’s experiments: the skin. She theorizes the skin as visual technology, as built environment, and as official discourse, developing a compelling framework for understanding the intersections of race, incarceration, and medical science in postwar America.
Skin for Skin: Death and Life for Inuit and Innu
by Gerald M. SiderSince the 1960s, the Native peoples of northeastern Canada, both Inuit and Innu, have experienced epidemics of substance abuse, domestic violence, and youth suicide. Seeking to understand these transformations in the capacities of Native communities to resist cultural, economic, and political domination, Gerald M. Sider offers an ethnographic analysis of aboriginal Canadians' changing experiences of historical violence. He relates acts of communal self-destruction to colonial and postcolonial policies and practices, as well as to the end of the fur and sealskin trades. Autonomy and dignity within Native communities have eroded as individuals have been deprived of their livelihoods and treated by the state and corporations as if they were disposable. Yet Native peoples' possession of valuable resources provides them with some income and power to negotiate with state and business interests. Sider's assessment of the health of Native communities in the Canadian province of Labrador is filled with potentially useful findings for Native peoples there and elsewhere. While harrowing, his account also suggests hope, which he finds in the expressiveness and power of Native peoples to struggle for a better tomorrow within and against domination.
Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis
by Sheila L. Cavanagh Angela Failler Rachel Alpha Johnston HurstAn interdisciplinary study of skin bridging cultural and psychoanalytic theory to consider how the body's "exterior" is central to human subjectivity and relations. The authors explore racialization, body modification, self-harm, and comedic representations of skin, drawing from the clinical domain, visual arts, popular culture, and literature.
Skinhead History, Identity, and Culture (Routledge Studies in Crime and Society)
by Kevin Borgeson Robin ValeriSkinheads go beyond the societal stereotype of hate mongers, bigots, and Neo-Nazis. The community of skins also includes traditional skins (those that adhere to the original philosophy of the British movement in 1969), Skinheads Against Racial prejudice (SHARPS), and gay skins, female skins and Neo-Nazi or Racist/Nationalist skins. Skinhead History, Identity, and Culture covers the history, identity, and culture of the skinhead movement in Europe and America, looking at the total culture of the skins through a cross-sectional analysis of skinheads in various countries. Authors Borgeson and Valeri provide original research data to cast new light into the skinhead community. Some of the data is ethnographic, drawing on face-to-face interviews with skins of all kinds, while other data is compiled from the Internet and social media about various skinhead groups within the United States, Europe, and Australia. The book covers the history of the subculture; explores the unique cultures of female, gay, and Neo-Nazi skins; and explores manifestations of the culture as represented on the Internet and in music. The work discusses how skinheads derive their values and morals and how they fit into the larger social structure.
Skipped Generation Households in Nigeria
by Joshua Oyeniyi Aransiola Funmi Togonu-Bickersteth Akanni Ibukun AkinyemiThis volume unpacks the phenomenon of skipped generation households—where children live with their grandparents and without their parents—as they become an increasingly common family dynamic in Nigeria and globally. The skipped generation household's emergence in sub-Saharan Africa has been driven by factors including the HIV/AIDS epidemic, labour-based migration, and ethno-religious conflicts. By examining the data from a national study on skipped generation households in Nigeria, contributions track benefits, opportunities, and effects associated with growing up in these households. Details including academic performance and career aspirations for grandchildren, as well as social-psychological and physical well-being of both them and their grandparents, are explored.
Skirts: Fashioning Modern Femininity in the Twentieth Century
by Kimberly Chrisman-CampbellIn a sparkling, beautifully illustrated social history, Skirts traces the shifting roles of women over the twentieth century through the era’s most iconic and influential dresses.While the story of women’s liberation has often been framed by the growing acceptance of pants over the twentieth century, the most important and influential female fashions of the era featured skirts. Suffragists and soldiers marched in skirts; the heroines of the Civil Rights Movement took a stand in skirts. Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe revolutionized modern art and Marie Curie won two Nobel Prizes in skirts. When NASA put a man on the moon, “the computer wore a skirt,” in the words of one of those computers, mathematician Katherine G. Johnson. As women made strides towards equality in the vote, the workforce, and the world at large, their wardrobes evolved with them. They did not need to "wear the pants" to be powerful or progressive; the dress itself became modern as designers like Mariano Fortuny, Coco Chanel, Jean Patou, and Diane von Furstenberg redefined femininity for a new era. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell's Skirts looks at the history of twentieth-century womenswear through the lens of game-changing styles like the little black dress and the Bar Suit, as well as more obscure innovations like the Taxi dress or the Pop-Over dress, which came with a matching potholder. These influential garments illuminate the times in which they were first worn—and the women who wore them—while continuing to shape contemporary fashion and even opening the door for a genderfluid future of skirts. At once an authoritative work of history and a delightfully entertaining romp through decades of fashion, Skirts charts the changing fortunes, freedoms, and aspirations of women themselves.
Skull Wars Kennewick Man, Archaeology, And The Battle For Native American Identity: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, And The Battle For Native American Identity
by David H. ThomasThe 1996 discovery, near Kennewick, Washington, of a 9,000-year-old Caucasoid skeleton brought more to the surface than bones. The explosive controversy and resulting lawsuit also raised a far more fundamental question: Who owns history? Many Indians see archeologists as desecrators of tribal rites and traditions; archeologists see their livelihoods and science threatened by the 1990 Federal reparation law, which gives tribes control over remains in their traditional territories. In this new work, Thomas charts the riveting story of this lawsuit, the archeologists’ deteriorating relations with American Indians, and the rise of scientific archeology. His telling of the tale gains extra credence from his own reputation as a leader in building cooperation between the two sides.
Skulls and Keys: The Hidden History of Yale's Secret Societies
by David Alan RichardsThe mysterious, highly influential hidden world of Yale’s secret societies is revealed in a definitive and scholarly history. Secret societies have fundamentally shaped America’s cultural and political landscapes. In ways that are expected but never explicit, the bonds made through the most elite of secret societies have won members Pulitzer Prizes, governorships, and even presidencies. At the apex of these institutions stands Yale University and its rumored twenty-six secret societies. Tracing a history that has intrigued and enthralled for centuries, alluring the attention of such luminaries as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Skulls and Keys traces the history of Yale’s societies as they set the foundation for America’s future secret clubs and helped define the modern age of politics. But there is a progressive side to Yale’s secret societies that we rarely hear about, one that, in the cultural tumult of the nineteen-sixties, resulted in the election of people of color, women, and gay men, even in proportions beyond their percentages in the class. It’s a side that is often overlooked in favor of sensational legends of blood oaths and toe-curling conspiracies. Dave Richards, an alum of Yale, sheds some light on the lesser known stories of Yale’s secret societies. He takes us through the history from Phi Beta Kappa in the American Revolution (originally a social and drinking society) through Skull and Bones and its rivals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While there have been articles and books on some of those societies, there has never been a scholarly history of the system as a whole.
Skuse'S Complete Confectioner
by SkuseFirst published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Skydive
by Kevin KerrHaving grown apart after a traumatic and defining moment in their youth, two brothers reconnect to fulfill a life-long ambition to go skydiving. Skydive explores the world of dreams and imagination: the universal human desire to push beyond our physical limitations and to fly.
Skye: The Island and Its Legends (Landscapes In Stone Ser.)
by Otta SwireAn oral history by &“Scotland&’s forgotten folklorist&” whose tale inspired the Neil Gaiman novella The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains (The Spooky Isles). This is a fabulous treasury of legend and wonder—tales of monsters who dwell in lakes; of small people who trap humans in earthen mounds where time stands still; of dark, shapeshifting spirits whose cloak of human form is betrayed by the sand and shells which fall from their hair. In the absence of a written tradition, for generations of skianachs, these tales, handed down orally, contained the very warp and weft of Hebridean history. They take us far beyond Christian times, to the edge of the Iron Age, and interweave with threads from the wider Atlantic tradition of Gaelic heroic myth and legend. Absolute Escapes—which lists Skye as one of the &“8 Books You Should Read Before Visiting Scotland&”—raves, &“This fascinating book written in the 1950s still has relevance today as it maps a route around the island, mixing mythology and local history to capture the spirit of the land and its legends. This is a great guide to the Isle of Skye, and a jolt to the imagination.&” &“Swire&’s prose makes for a very entertaining read . . . as a source of folklore, it&’s unbeatable.&” —The Spooky Isles
Skype: Bodies, Screens, Space,
by Robyn LonghurstDespite the popularity of Skype with video many of us are still figuring out how to ‘do’ it. Interviews reveal that we can now run the programme but we are less certain about how to ‘perform’ in front of the webcam. Seeing ourselves in the box on the side can feel strange. We are not quite sure which bits of our bodies to display on the screen, how much to move around the room, or move the device around the room. Is it acceptable to use Skype with video at a funeral, in crowded spaces or while in bed? This book addresses how people are emotionally and affectually connecting with others audio-synchronously on the screen in a variety of different spatial contexts. Topics include Skype with video being used by grandparents to connect with grandchildren, friends and family using it for special occasions, and partners using it for romance and sex. Theories addressing bodies, gender, queerness, phenomenology and orientation inform the research. It concludes that while Skype does not offer some kind of utopian future, it does open up possibilities for existing power relations to be filtered through new lines of sight/site which are shaping what bodies can do and where.
Skyscraper Settlement: The Many Lives of Christodora House
by Joyce MilambilingThe roles that Christodora House has played from 19th-century settlement house to its newest formsSettlement house workers helped transform the lives of thousands of people despite lack of funding, the influenza epidemic of 1918, economic depressions, and two World Wars. Many of these houses still exist in the original neighborhoods where they confront the problems of today and advocate for their communities.Christodora House, founded in 1897 as “The Young Women’s Settlement,” played an important role in the life of immigrants and other residents on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. For over 50 years, residents and volunteers at Christodora House provided classes, clubs, recreational activities, and medical and dental clinics for thousands of New Yorkers, and then continued to operate programs out of public housing and other locations for more than two decades.The building at 143 Avenue B, now housing condominiums, has had a tumultuous history since 1948 but still stands, towering over its tenement neighborhood in the East Village. Christodora Inc. is now a nonprofit foundation with offices in Midtown Manhattan, whose staff works with underserved New Yorkers, including youth in the public school system, carrying on a long, distinguished history of service to the city and country.
Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens
by J. R. MillerHighly acclaimed when the first edition appeared in 1989, "Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens" is the first comprehensive account of Indian-white relations throughout Canada's history. J.R. Miller charts the deterioration of the relationship from the initial, mutually beneficial contact in the fur trade to the current impasse in which Indians are resisting displacement and marginalization.This new edition is the result of substantial revision to incorporate current scholarship and bring the text up to date. It includes new material on the North, and reflects changes brought about by the Oka crisis, the sovereignty issue, and the various court decisions of the 1990s. It also includes new material on residential schools, treaty making, and land claims.
Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada
by J. R. MillerHighly acclaimed when the first edition appeared in 1989, "Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens" is the first comprehensive account of Indian-white relations throughout Canada's history. J.R. Miller charts the deterioration of the relationship from the initial, mutually beneficial contact in the fur trade to the current impasse in which Indians are resisting displacement and marginalization.This new edition is the result of substantial revision to incorporate current scholarship and bring the text up to date. It includes new material on the North, and reflects changes brought about by the Oka crisis, the sovereignty issue, and the various court decisions of the 1990s. It also includes new material on residential schools, treaty making, and land claims.
Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Native-Newcomer Relations in Canada, Fourth Edition
by J. R. MillerFirst published in 1989, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens continues to earn wide acclaim for its comprehensive account of Native-newcomer relations throughout Canada’s history. Author J.R. Miller charts the deterioration of the relationship from the initial, mutually beneficial contact in the fur trade to the current displacement and marginalization of the Indigenous population. The fourth edition of Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens is the result of considerable revision and expansion to incorporate current scholarship and developments over the past twenty years in federal government policy and Aboriginal political organization. It includes new information regarding political organization, land claims in the courts, public debates, as well as the haunting legacy of residential schools in Canada. Critical to Canadian university-level classes in history, Indigenous studies, sociology, education, and law, the fourth edition of Skyscrapers will be also be useful to journalists and lawyers, as well as leaders of organizations dealing with Indigenous issues. Not solely a text for specialists in post-secondary institutions, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens explores the consequence of altered Native-newcomer relations, from cooperation to coercion, and the lasting legacy of this impasse.
Skywalks: Robert Gordon's Untold Story of Hallmark's Kansas City Disaster
by R. Eli PaulIn 1981 the suspended walkways—or &“skywalks&”—in Kansas City&’s Hyatt Regency hotel fell and killed 114 people. It was the deadliest building collapse in the United States until the fall of New York&’s Twin Towers on 9/11. In Skywalks R. Eli Paul follows the actions of attorney Robert Gordon, an insider to the bitter litigation that followed. Representing the plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit against those who designed, built, inspected, owned, and managed the hotel, Gordon was tenacious in uncovering damaging facts. He wanted his findings presented before a jury, where his legal team would assign blame from underlings to corporate higher-ups, while securing a massive judgment in his clients&’ favor. But when the case was settled out from under Gordon, he turned to another medium to get the truth out: a quixotic book project that consumed the rest of his life. For a decade the irascible attorney-turned-writer churned through a succession of high-powered literary agents, talented ghost writers, and New York trade publishers. Gordon&’s resistance to collaboration and compromise resulted in a controversial but unpublishable manuscript, &“House of Cards,&” finished long after the public&’s interest had waned. His conclusions, still explosive but never receiving their proper attention, laid the blame for the disaster largely at the feet of the hotel&’s owner and Kansas City&’s most visible and powerful corporation, Hallmark Cards Inc. Gordon gave up his lucrative law practice and lived the rest of his life as a virtual recluse in his mansion in Mission Hills, Kansas. David had fought Goliath, and to his despair, Goliath had won. Gordon died in 2008 without ever seeing his book published or the full truth told. Skywalks is a long-overdue corrective, built on a foundation of untapped historical materials Gordon compiled, as well as his own unpublished writings.
Skywriting by Word of Mouth
by John LennonJohn Lennon wrote Skywriting by Word of Mouth, an impressive collection of writings and drawings, during Yoko Ono's pregnancy with Sean, and always planned to have it published. The book's publication was a wish that seemed to end with Lennon's assassination in 1980 and the theft of the manuscript from the Lennons' home in 1982. When it was recovered and first published in 1986, Skywriting received immediate critical and popular acclaim. Filled with Lennon's extraordinary creative powers and lavishly illustrated with his own drawings, the collection reveals his fertile creative spirit up close and in full force. Included in Skywriting are "Two Virgins," written when the public learned that John and Yoko were living together as husband and wife, and John's only autobiography, "The Ballad of John and Yoko." In addition there are notes on his falling in love with Yoko, the breakup of the Beatles, his persecution by U.S. authorities, and his withdrawal from public life. This is a book with John Lennon's spirit on every page—a spirit the world needs to remember.
Slacks and Calluses: Our Summer in a Bomber Factory
by Clara Marie Allen Constance BowmanIn 1943 two spirited young teachers decided to do their part for the war effort by spending their summer vacation working the swing shift on a B-24 production line at a San Diego bomber plant. Entering a male-dominated realm of welding torches and bomb bays, they learned to use tools that they had never seen before, live with aluminum shavings in their hair, and get along with supervisors and coworkers from all walks of life. They also learned that wearing their factory slacks on the street caused men to treat them in a way for which their "dignified schoolteacher-hood" hadn't prepared them. At times charming, hilarious, and incredibly perceptive, Slacks and Calluses brings into focus an overlooked part of the war effort, one that forever changed the way the women were viewed in America.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Slam School: Learning Through Conflict in the Hip-hop and Spoken Word Classroom
by Bronwen E. LowIn this study, Low (education, McGill U. , Canada) relates how a white teacher implemented the study of hip-hop and spoken word culture into urban high school language arts classes, which she co-taught and helped develop the curriculum for. She analyzes the dynamics of teaching and learning in these classes to argue that the reasons that teachers and administrators resist introducing hip-hop into curriculum--its complex issues of gender, violence, sexuality, materialism, race, and language--are what make it important pedagogically. She focuses on African American youth in interaction with white youth, teachers, and administrators, describing the student's exploration of poetry performance and writing and their experiences with the language of the hip-hop culture. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc. , Portland, OR (booknews. com)
Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture
by Kaya OakesA lively examination of the spirit and practices that have made the indie movement into a powerful cultural phenomenonYou know the look: skinny jeans, Chuck Taylors, perfectly mussed bed-head hair; You know the music: Modest Mouse, the Shins, Pavement. You know the ethos: DIY with a big helping of irony. But what does it really mean to be "indie"? As popular television shows adopt indie soundtracks and the signature style bleeds into mainstream fashion, the quirky individuality of the movement seems to be losing ground. In Slanted and Enchanted, Kaya Oakes demonstrates how this phase is part of the natural cycle of a culture that reinvents itself continuously to preserve its core ideals of experimentation, freedom, and collaboration. Through interviews and profiles of the artists who have spearheaded the cause over the years—including Mike Watt, David Berman, Kathleen Hanna, and Dan Clowes—Oakes examines the collective creativity and cross-genre experimentation that are the hallmarks of this popular lifestyle trend. Her visits to music festivals, craft fairs, and smaller collectives around the country round out the story, providing a compelling portayal of indie life on the ground. Culminating in the current indie milieu of music, crafting, style, art, comics, and zines, Oakes reveals from whence indie came and where it will go next.
Slaphappy: Pride, Prejudice, and Professional Wrestling
by Thomas HackettSlaphappy is reporter Thomas Hackett's penetrating look at the world of professional wrestling, for those who love the spectacle and for the sport's skeptics and the uninitiated. Through interviews with wrestlers, promoters, and fans, Hackett explores the full range of issues that swirl around wrestling culture -- fame, masculinity, violence, aggression, performance, and play. Among the lessons of professional wrestling is that deceit is a fundamental fact of American life. And yet, paradoxically, the one thing wrestling isn't is dishonest. Although wrestlers play pretend, wrestling itself doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is -- fantastically absurd, a very American kind of madness. Celebrity-obsessed, pathologically narcissistic, murderously competitive, it both epitomizes and parodies the delusional egoism at the heart of the culture.More than that, wrestling provides its fans and performers a medium for thinking about "getting over" in America today. This spectacle of excess may be the apotheosis of American imbecility, but it is also defiant, hopeful, liberating, and unifying -- a throwback to the raucous pleasures of early theater. Fans aren't detached connoisseurs, looking satirically down on life, concealing their anxieties in the cold comforts of irony. They are total participants in a carnival of their own making, shouting epithets, throwing chairs, expatiating their worries in a crowd's triumphant foolishness.It is, Slaphappy concludes, all the stuff of human culture. Where does fantasy end and reality begin? Where does the performance stop and life take over? Writing with affection and discernment, Hackett gets deep into the culture, discovering that the make-believe competition of wrestling is indeed "real" for millions of young men -- real in the sense that something real and important is at stake: their worth as men.
Slapstick Comedy (AFI Film Readers)
by Tom PaulusFrom Chaplin’s tramp to the Bathing Beauties, from madcap chases to skyscraper perils, slapstick comedy supplied many of the most enduring icons of American cinema in the silent era. This collection of fourteen essays by prominent film scholars challenges longstanding critical dogma and offers new conceptual frameworks for thinking about silent comedy’s place in film history and American culture. The contributors discuss a broad range of topics including the contested theatrical or cinematic origins of slapstick; the comic spectacle of crazy technology and trick stunts; the filmmakers who shaped the style of early slapstick; and comedy’s implications for theories of film form and spectatorship. This volume is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the origins and continued importance of a film genre at the heart of American cinema from its earliest days to today.
Slave Against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South
by Jeff ForretIn the first-ever comprehensive analysis of violence between slaves in the antebellum South, Jeff Forret challenges persistent notions of slave communities as sites of unwavering harmony and solidarity. Though existing scholarship shows that intraracial black violence did not reach high levels until after Reconstruction, contemporary records bear witness to its regular presence among enslaved populations. Slave against Slave explores the roots of and motivations for such violence and the ways in which slaves, masters, churches, and civil and criminal laws worked to hold it in check. Far from focusing on violence alone, Forret's work also adds depth to our understanding of morality among the enslaved, revealing how slaves sought to prevent violence and punish those who engaged in it. Forret mines a vast array of slave narratives, slaveholders' journals, travelers' accounts, and church and court records from across the South to approximate the prevalence of slave-against-slave violence prior to the Civil War. A diverse range of motives for these conflicts emerges, from tensions over status differences, to disagreements originating at work and in private, to discord relating to the slave economy and the web of debts that slaves owed one another, to courtship rivalries, marital disputes, and adulterous affairs. Forret also uncovers the role of explicitly gendered violence in bondpeople's constructions of masculinity and femininity, suggesting a system of honor among slaves that would have been familiar to southern white men and women, had they cared to acknowledge it. Though many generations of scholars have examined violence in the South as perpetrated by and against whites, the internal clashes within the slave quarters have remained largely unexplored. Forret's analysis of intraracial slave conflicts in the Old South examines narratives of violence in slave communities, opening a new line of inquiry into the study of American slavery.
Slave Breeding: Sex, Violence, and Memory in African American History
by Gregory D. SmithersFor over two centuries, the topic of slave breeding has occupied a controversial place in the master narrative of American history. From nineteenth-century abolitionists to twentieth-century filmmakers and artists, Americans have debated whether slave owners deliberately and coercively manipulated the sexual practices and marital status of enslaved African Americans to reproduce new generations of slaves for profit.In this bold and provocative book, historian Gregory Smithers investigates how African Americans have narrated, remembered, and represented slave-breeding practices. He argues that while social and economic historians have downplayed the significance of slave breeding, African Americans have refused to forget the violence and sexual coercion associated with the plantation South. By placing African American histories and memories of slave breeding within the larger context of America’s history of racial and gender discrimination, Smithers sheds much-needed light on African American collective memory, racialized perceptions of fragile black families, and the long history of racially motivated violence against men, women, and children of color.