Author: David M. Halperin File Type: pdf The past fifty years are conventionally understood to have witnessed an uninterrupted expansion of sexual rights and liberties in the United States. This state-of-the-art collection tells a different story while progress has been made in marriage equality, reproductive rights, access to birth control, and other areas, government and civil society are waging a war on stigmatized sex by means of law, surveillance, and social control. The contributors document the history and operation of sex offender registries andthe criminalization of HIV, as well as highly punitive measures against sex work that do more to harm women than to combat human trafficking. They reveal that sex crimes are punished more harshly than other crimes, while new legal and administrative regulations drastically restrict who is permitted to have sex. By examining how the ever-intensifying war on sex affects both privileged and marginalized communities, the essays collected here show why sexual liberation is indispensable to social justice and human rights. Contributors. Alexis Agathocleous, Elizabeth Bernstein, J. Wallace Borchert, Mary Anne Case, Scott De Orio, David M. Halperin, Amber Hollibaugh, Trevor Hoppe, Hans Tao-Ming Huang, Regina Kunzel, Roger N. Lancaster, Judith Levine, Laura Mansnerus, Owen Daniel McCarter, Erica R. Meiners, R. Noll, Melissa Petro, Carol Queen, Penelope Saunders, Sean Strub, Maurice Tomlinson, Gregory Tomso **

Author: Elizabeth Segal File Type: pdf Our ability to understand others and help others understand us is essential to our individual and collective well-being. Yet there are many barriers that keep us from walking in the shoes of others fear, skepticism, and power structures that separate us from those outside our narrow groups. To progress in a multicultural world and ensure our common good, we need to overcome these obstacles. Our best hope can be found in the skill of empathy.In Social Empathy, Elizabeth A. Segal explains how we can develop our ability to understand one another and have compassion toward different social groups. When we are socially empathic, we not only imagine what it is like to be another person, but we consider their social, economic, and political circumstances and what shaped them. Segal explains the evolutionary and learned components of interpersonal and social empathy, including neurobiological factors and the role of social structures. Ultimately, empathy is not only a part of interpersonal relations it is fundamental to interactions between different social groups and can be a way to bridge diverse people and communities. A clear and useful explanation of an often misunderstood concept, Social Empathy brings together sociology, psychology, social work, and cognitive neuroscience to illustrate how to become better advocates for justice.**ReviewThis book brings together important ideas about how we relate to one another and make decisions about the society we live in. Using social empathy to frame community decision making such as social policies helps us understand our citizenship responsibilities. Especially in times of extreme political divisiveness, we need to be reminded of the consequences of a lack of social empathyin our individual relationships, communities, and national discourse. Anyone who is asking difficult questions about divisiveness in their own community will find Segals ideas useful in reflecting on questions of why and what next. (Sarah Garlington, Ohio University) Social Empathy expands on what we know about interpersonal empathy and strikes right at the heart of todays partisan conflicts. In readable, humane, and informative prose, this book explains how we can overcome tribal instincts and forge the supportive, meaningful connections we need in order to thrive in todays global environment. (Caroline Wellbery, Georgetown University School of Medicine) Elizabeth Segals groundbreaking work on social empathy explains how we can expand our capacity to appreciate the social contexts and lived experiences of diverse others. Given growing diversity and urbanization in countries worldwide, this book could not be more timely or urgent for strengthening public problem-solving and enhancing our collective wellbeing. (William M. Snyder, coauthor of Cultivating Communities of Practice) In this stellar book, Elizabeth Segal offers a cross disciplinary picture of social empathy. Like the periodic table, she distills empathy to its essential elements, helping readers understand the essence of empathic thinking and living. This book is a must read for all concerned about how to educate ourselves and the next generation to live an empathic life. (Miriam Raider-Roth, University of Cincinnati) Segal explains the fundamentals of empathy, why the skill is important yet difficult to emulate...ought to be required reading for the pathologically narcissistic POTUS and all his lackeys. (Library Journal) About the Author Elizabeth A. Segal is a professor in the School of Social Work at Arizona State University. She is the author of Social Welfare Policy and Social Programs A Values Perspective, fourth edition (2016) and coauthor of Assessing Empathy (Columbia, 2017).

Author: Bruce Janacek File Type: pdf What did it mean to believe in alchemy in early modern England? In this book, Bruce Janacek considers alchemical beliefs in the context of the writings of Thomas Tymme, Robert Fludd, Francis Bacon, Sir Kenelm Digby, and Elias Ashmole. Rather than examine alchemy from a scientific or medical perspective, Janacek presents it as integrated into the broader political, philosophical, and religious upheavals of the first half of the seventeenth century, arguing that the interest of these elite figures in alchemy was part of an understanding that supported their nationaland in some cases royalistloyalty and theological orthodoxy. Janacek investigates how and why individuals who supported or were actually placed at the traditional center of power in Englands church and state believed in the relevance of alchemy at a time when their society, their government, their careers, and, in some cases, their very lives were at stake. **

Author: Elizabeth A. Povinelli File Type: pdf In Geontologies Elizabeth A. Povinelli continues her project of mapping the current conditions of late liberalism by offering a bold retheorization of power. Finding Foucauldian biopolitics unable to adequately reveal contemporary mechanisms of power and governance, Povinelli describes a mode of power she calls geontopower, which operates through the regulation of the distinction between Life and Nonlife and the figures of the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus. Geontologies examines this formation of power from the perspective of Indigenous Australian maneuvers against the settler state. And it probes how our contemporary critical languagesanthropogenic climate change, plasticity, new materialism, antinormativityoften unwittingly transform their struggles against geontopower into a deeper entwinement within it. A woman who became a river, a snakelike entity who spawns the fog, plesiosaurus fossils and vast networks of rock weirs in asking how these different forms of existence refuse incorporation into the vocabularies of Western theory Povinelli provides a revelatory new way to understand a form of power long self-evident in certain regimes of settler late liberalism but now becoming visible much further beyond.