Compositions, A Life: An Autoethnography is the story of Judith Summerfield's life, within the varied worlds in which she has lived. Told by a master storyteller who is also a scholar of narrative and a compelling teacher of writing and literature, the book embraces a meta-textual approach. Summerfield focuses on ethnographic elements of language, family, culture, and history, beginning with her childhood in a coal mining town in southwestern Pennsylvania with a story-telling father who survived the Russian Revolution in Ukraine, and an American-born mother who insisted she learn "proper" English usage. She chronicles her education during the feminist, Civil Rights, and cultural revolutions of the last century, and critically self-examines her years of teaching and leadership at The City University of New York.

The book includes twenty-five writing prompts, and twenty-plus images to engage reader response by the individual reader, and for introductory writing courses, graduate and professional programs, and in community writing groups.

"Judith Summerfield's latest book, Compositions, a Life: An Autoethnography, is a celebration of all the ways a story can be told: through family history both harrowing and mundane, through elegiac portraits of place, through photographs of people living and dead (and recipes in their handwriting), and above all through the act of writing stories into being. It's part folk art, part writing manual, part cultural history. This is a book to read with a pencil in your hand, because Summerfield will inspire her readers to commit their own stories to shimmering life."

-Crystal Benedicks, Ph.D., Department of English, Co-Chair of First-Year Experience, Coordinator of Writing Across the Curriculum, Wabash University

"In Compositions, a Life: An Autoethnography, Judith Summerfield weaves together individual and collective history to reflect on the texts, people, places, and institutions that have informed her thoughtful work as a teacher, writer, and higher education administrator. Interspersing personal memoir with engaging writing exercises, Summerfield not only explores the narrative compositions of her life but also asks readers to reflect on stories of their own. Compositions, a Life is a powerful and poignant testament to the ways in which we are all connected and an argument for why we must continue to strive to understand ourselves and others, through storytelling, reading, writing, listening, and community."

-Caroline Hellman, Ph.D., Professor of English/Interim Special Assistant to the President, City Tech, CUNY

This book explains how taxonomy can be used to describe and connect social actors in an integral way. Integral communication refers to a specific way of open information exchange which uses all qualities and preferences of subjects in conversation and allows anonymous feedback exchange, which enhances trust, learning and development. The role of integral communication is to promote perceptiveness, collaboration, personal development, and organizational learning among all the actors involved.

In this book, the authors propose a new original way of digital communication that uses tags and their metadata to describe qualities and preferences of a particular node in the network. Although most social networks, sharing platforms and e-government frameworks are already applying taxonomies and social tagging to define user identity, none of them is focused on tags exclusively, while within an integral communication framework they represent the basic element of user definition and networking. In addition, other social platforms rarely allow anonymous feedback exchange, and they are usually not focused on the personal development of their end-users. Aside from helping actors present their attributes and preferences, integral communication promotes teamwork, sustainability, trust, organisational learning, and personalized communication with AI machines.

After reading this book, readers will learn how to harness the power of integral networking and understand why anonymous feedback is a critical element for learning and development.

Communication failures are ubiquitous. Exacerbating the situation, much communication advice is superficial, and the vast research base that should inform best practices in communication is difficult to navigate. Beyond the Sage on the Stage translates lessons from carefully documented scholarship into lucid prose with meaningful examples that illustrate readily applicable communication strategies.

This user-friendly guide provides a unique cross-disciplinary approach to developing the knowledge, skills, and habits of mind to achieve evolving communication goals. Topics include optimizing language and visuals, designing comparisons, composing logic stories, conveying authenticity, clarifying data and uncertainty, supporting reasoning and decision-making, avoiding backfires, reading body language, and cultivating empathy.

The book is constructed with a clear progression of logic based on a proven educational framework and provides guidance for communication about both uncontroversial and controversial topics. Demonstrating how commonly dispensed communication advice is often counterproductive, Beyond the Sage on the Stage is an innovative toolkit for being understood, fostering trust and genuine connection, and building a foundation for more effective, inclusive communication.

This book explores the ethical problems of algorithmic bias and its potential impact on populations that experience health disparities by examining the historical underpinnings of explicit and implicit bias, the influence of the social determinants of health, and the inclusion of racial and ethnic minorities in data. Over the last twenty-five years, the diagnosis and treatment of disease have advanced at breakneck speeds. Currently, we have technologies that have revolutionized the practice of medicine, such as telemedicine, precision medicine, big data, and AI. These technologies, especially AI, promise to improve the quality of patient care, lower health care costs, improve patient treatment outcomes, and decrease patient mortality. AI may also be a tool that reduces health disparities; however, algorithmic bias may impede its success. This book explores the risks of using AI in the context of health disparities. It is of interest to health services researchers,ethicists, policy analysts, social scientists, health disparities researchers, and AI policy makers.

Burnt by Democracy traces the political ascendance of neoliberalism and its effects on youth. The book explores democracy and citizenship as described in interviews with over forty young people - ages 16 to 30 - who have either experienced homelessness or identify as an activist, living in five liberal democracies: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

Highlighting significant cuts to social and affordable housing, astronomical increases in the costs of higher education, and the transformation and erosion of state benefits systems, Jacqueline Kennelly argues that democracy's decline is not occurring because young people are apathetic, or focused on informal politics, or unaware of their civic duties. Rather, it is because of collective misunderstanding about how democracy is actually structured, how individuals learn to participate, and how growing wealth inequality has undermined the capacity of those at the bottom to meaningfully advocate for changes that might improve their conditions.

Against a vivid and often heart-breaking backdrop of stories from young people struggling to survive and thrive under conditions of ever-expanding state retrenchment and inequality, Burnt by Democracy makes a timely and impassioned plea for protecting and strengthening democracy by truly levelling the playing field for all.

A groundbreaking critique of the digital world that analyzes its universal technological foundations

Whence that nagging sense that something in the digital is amiss-that, as wonderful as our devices are, time spent on smartphones and computers leaves us sour, enervated, alienated? The Digital and Its Discontents uniquely explains that worry and points us toward a more satisfying relationship between our digital lives and our nondigital selves, one that requires a radical change in the way we incorporate technology into our lives.

Aden Evens analyzes universal technological principles-in particular, the binary logic-to show that they encourage certain ways of thinking while making others more challenging or impossible. What is out of reach for any digital machine is contingency, the ontological principle that refuses every rule. As humans engage ourselves and our world ever more through digital machines, we are losing touch with contingency and so banishing from our lives the accidental and unexpected that fuel our most creative and novel possibilities for living.

Taking cues from philosophy rather than cultural or media theory, Evens argues that the consequences of this erosion of contingency are significant yet often overlooked because the same values that make the digital seem so desirable also make contingency seem unimportant-without contingency the digital is confined to what has already been thought, and yet the digital's ubiquity has allowed it to disguise this inherent sterility. Responsive only to desires that meet the demands of its narrow logic, the digital requires its users to practice those same ideological dictates, instituting a hegemony of thought and value sustained by the pervasive presence of digital mechanisms. Interweaving technical and philosophical concepts, The Digital and Its Discontents advances a powerful and urgent argument about the digital and its impact on our lives.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

How animation can reconnect us with bodily experiences

Film and media studies scholarship has often argued that digital cinema and CGI provoke a sense of disembodiment in viewers; they are seen as merely fantastic or unreal. In her in-depth exploration of the phenomenology of animation, Sandra Annett offers a new perspective: that animated films and digital media in fact evoke vivid embodied sensations in viewers and connect them with the lifeworld of experience.

Starting with the emergence of digital technologies in filmmaking in the 1980s, Annett argues that contemporary digital media is indebted to the longer history of animation. She looks at a wide range of animation-from Disney films to anime, electro swing music videos to Vocaloids-to explore how animation, through its material forms and visual styles, can evoke bodily sensations of touch, weight, and orientation in space. Each chapter discusses well-known forms of animation from the United States, France, Japan, South Korea, and China, examining how they provoke different sensations in viewers, such as floating and falling in Howl's Moving Castle and My Beautiful Girl Mari, and how the body is mediated in films that combine animation and live action, as seen in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Song of the South. These films set the stage for an exploration of how animation and embodiment manifest in contemporary global media, from CGI and motion capture in Disney's "live action remakes" to new media installations by artists like Lu Yang.

Leveraging an array of case studies through a new approach to film phenomenology, The Flesh of Animation offers an enlightening discussion of why animation provides a sensational experience for viewers not replicable through other media forms.

How Latina/o/x gang literature and film represent women and gay gang members' challenges to gendered, sexual, racial, and class oppression.

Clicas examines Latina/o/x literature and film by and/or about gay and women gang members. Through close readings of literature and film, Frank GarcIa reimagines the typical narratives describing gang membership and culture, amplifying and complicating critical gang studies in the social sciences and humanities and looking at gangs across racial, ethnic, and national identities. Analyzing how the autobiographical poetry of Ana Castillo presents gang fashion, culture, and violence to the outside world, the effects of women performing female masculinity in the novel Locas, and gay gang members' experiences of community in the documentary Homeboy, GarcIa complicates the dialogue regarding hypermasculine gang cultures. He shows how they are accessible not only to straight men but also to women and gay men who can appropriate them in complicated ways, which can be harming and also, at times, emancipating. Reading gang members as (de)colonial agents who contest the power relations, inequalities, oppressions, and hierarchies of the United States, Clicas considers how women and gay gang members resist materially and psychologically within a milieu shaped by the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and class.