Faculty and Staff Books

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Automation and Augmentation: Human Labor as an Essential Complement to Machines

Maureen Ebben PhD

Chapter 1 from Maintaining Social Well-Being and Meaningful Work in a Highly Automated Job Market, edited by Shalin Hai-Jew.

More about this chapter:

This chapter examines the nature of work where human labor is a complement to machines and considers its import for social well-being. While dominant portrayals about the effects of work automation are often characterized by discourses of fear and hype, these have limited utility. The chapter proposes moving beyond fear and hype to consider the ways in which automation alters the organization of work and the human role. It asserts that, although essential, the human role in automation is often obscured. Drawing on the concepts of “fauxtomation,” "heteromation," and human infrastructures, the chapter makes visible hidden forms of human labor in automated work and maintains that a positive strategy for social well-being is the recognition and revaluation of human work in automated processes.
Creating a Multidirectional Memory for Healing in the Former Yugoslavia

Stephanie C. Edwards PhD

Book is Forthcoming: June 2020

Chapter from Healing and Peacebuilding after War: Transforming Trauma in Bosnia and Herzegovina, edited by Julianne Funk and Nancy Good.

About the book:

This book brings together multiple perspectives to examine the strengths and limitations of efforts to promote healing and peacebuilding after war, focusing on the aftermath of the traumatic armed conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina,

This book begins with a simple premise: trauma that is not transformed is transferred. Drawing on multidisciplinary insights from academics, peace practitioners and trauma experts, this book examines the limitations of our current strategies for promoting healing and peacebuilding after war, while offering inroads into best practices to prevent future violence through psychosocial trauma recovery and the healing of memories. The contributions create a conversation which allows readers to critically rethink the deeper roots and mechanisms of trauma created by the war.

Collectively, the authors provide strategic recommendations to policymakers, peace practitioners, donors and international organizations engaged in work in Bosnia and Herzegovina— strategies that can be applied to other countries rebuilding after war.

This volume will be of much interest to students of conflict resolution, peacebuilding, social psychology, Balkan politics and International Relations in general.
Hope Now

Julien Murphy PhD

Chapter from The Sartrean Mind, edited by Matthew C. Eshleman and Constance M. Lui.

More about this title:

Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. His influence extends beyond academic philosophy to areas as diverse as anti-colonial movements, youth culture, literary criticism, and artistic developments around the world. Beginning with an introduction and biography of Jean-Paul Sartre by Matthew C. Eshleman, 42 chapters by a team of international contributors cover all the major aspects of Sartre’s thought in the following key areas:
- Sartre’s philosophical and historical context
- Sartre and phenomenology
- Sartre, existentialism, and ontology
- Sartre and ethics
- Sartre and political theory
- Aesthetics, literature, and biography
- Sartre’s engagements with other thinkers.
The Sartrean Mind is the most comprehensive collection on Sartre published to date. It is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, as well as for those in related disciplines where Sartre’s work has continuing importance, such as literature, French studies, and politics.
Cartography: The ideal and its history

Matthew H. Edney PhD

Over the past four decades, the volumes published in the landmark History of Cartography series have both chronicled and encouraged scholarship about maps and mapping practices across time and space. As the current director of the project that has produced these volumes, Matthew H. Edney has a unique vantage point for understanding what “cartography” has come to mean and include.

In this book Edney disavows the term cartography, rejecting the notion that maps represent an undifferentiated category of objects for study. Rather than treating maps as a single, unified group, he argues, scholars need to take a processual approach that examines specific types of maps—sea charts versus thematic maps, for example—in the context of the unique circumstances of their production, circulation, and consumption. To illuminate this bold argument, Edney chronicles precisely how the ideal of cartography that has developed in the West since 1800 has gone astray. By exposing the flaws in this ideal, his book challenges everyone who studies maps and mapping practices to reexamine their approach to the topic. The study of cartography will never be the same.
Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision

Brendan McQuade PhD

The United States has poured over a billion dollars into a network of interagency intelligence centers called “fusion centers.” These centers were ostensibly set up to prevent terrorism, but politicians, the press, and policy advocates have criticized them for failing on this account. So why do these security systems persist? Pacifying the Homeland travels inside the secret world of intelligence fusion, looks beyond the apparent failure of fusion centers, and reveals a broader shift away from mass incarceration and toward a more surveillance- and police-intensive system of social regulation.

Provided with unprecedented access to domestic intelligence centers, Brendan McQuade uncovers how the institutionalization of intelligence fusion enables decarceration without fully addressing the underlying social problems at the root of mass incarceration. The result is a startling analysis that contributes to the debates on surveillance, mass incarceration, and policing and challenges readers to see surveillance, policing, mass incarceration, and the security state in an entirely new light.
Bestial Oblivion: War, humanism, and ecology in Early Modern England

Benjamin Bertram PhD

Although war is a heterogeneous assemblage of the human and nonhuman, it nevertheless builds the illusion of human autonomy and singularity. Focusing on war and ecology, a neglected topic in early modern ecocriticism, Bestial Oblivion: War, Humanism, and Ecology in Early Modern England shows how warfare unsettles ideas of the human, yet ultimately contributes to, and is then perpetuated by, anthropocentrism. Bertram’s study of early modern warfare’s impact on human-animal and human-technology relationships draws upon posthumanist theory, animal studies, and the new materialisms, focusing on responses to the Anglo-Spanish War, the Italian Wars, the Wars of Religion, the colonization of Ireland, and Jacobean “peace.” The monograph examines a wide range of texts—essays, drama, military treatises, paintings, poetry, engravings, war reports, travel narratives—and authors—Erasmus, Machiavelli, Digges, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Coryate, Bacon—to show how an intricate web of perpetual war altered the perception of the physical environment as well as the ideologies and practices establishing what it meant to be human.
Costs of Corporate Conscience: How Women, Queers, and People of Color Are Paying for Hobby Lobby’s Sincerely-Held Beliefs

Megan Goodwin PhD

Chapter from Religion in the Age of Obama, edited by Juan Marcial Floyd-Thomas and Anthony Pinn.

About the book:

This is the first book to focus on the significance of religion during President Obama's years in the White House. Addressing issues ranging from identity politics, immigration, income inequality, Islamophobia and international affairs, Religion in the Age of Obama explores the religious and moral underpinnings of the Obama presidency and subsequent debates regarding his tenure in the White House. It provides an analysis of Obama's beliefs and their relationship to his vision of public life, as well as the way in which the general ethos of religion and non-religion has shifted over the past decade in the United States under his presidency.

Topics include how Obama has employed religious rhetoric in response to both international and domestic events, his attempt to inhabit a kind of Blackness that comforts and reassures rather than challenges White America, the limits of Christian hospitality within U.S. immigration policy and the racialization of Islam in the U.S. national imagination.

Religion in the Age of Obama shows that the years of the Obama presidency served as a watershed moment of significant reorganization of the role of religion in national public life. It is a timely contribution to debates on religion, race and public life in the United States.
The Boathouse: an Angus Quinn novel

Elaine Lohrman

The Boathouse is a suspenseful historical novel set in New York City during the early 1890s. The story unfolds as Hazel Chapman desperately searches for her missing husband, Lewis Chapman, while protecting their nineteen-year-old daughter, Nellie, from the truth that her father is wanted for murder. Hazel scours the Upper West Side, eventually crossing paths with a kindly Irish policeman, Sergeant Angus Quinn, and his rookie partner, Paulie Abbott. As the pair put their detective skills to work to find the killer before he strikes again, Hazel guards a secret about Lewis and their lives together, and vows to find her husband before the police can apprehend him. While Hazel fights exhaustion and is in danger of losing their family home, Sergeant Quinn makes a startling discovery about the leadership of the Twentieth Precinct police station. He puts his own life and that of his partner in danger as they fight the political powerhouse that controls city hall and the metropolitan police force. This thrilling story, the first in a series of novels featuring Sergeant Quinn and Patrolman Abbott, will compel readers to keep turning the pages right up to the very unexpected ending.
Gender Reckonings: New Social Theory and Research

James W. Messerschmidt, Patricia Yancey Martin, Michael A. Messner, and Raewyn Connell

Edited by James W. Messerschmidt, Patricia Yancey Martin, Michael A. Messner, and Raewyn Connell

Since scholars began interrogating the meaning of gender and sexuality in society, this field has become essential to the study of sociology. Gender Reckonings aims to map new directions for understanding gender and sexuality within a more pragmatic, dynamic, and socially relevant framework. It shows how gender relations must be understood on a large scale as well as in intimate detail.

The contributors return to the basics, questioning how gender patterns change, how we can realize gender equality, and how the structures of gender impact daily life. Gender Reckonings covers not only foundational concepts of gender relations and gender justice, but also explores postcolonial patterns of gender, intersectionality, gender fluidity, transgender practices, neoliberalism, and queer theory.

Gender Reckonings

combines the insights of gender and sexuality scholars from different generations, fields, and world regions. The editors and contributors are leading social scientists from six continents, and the book gives vivid accounts of the changing politics of gender in different communities.
Thin Rising Vapors

Seth Rogoff ABD, MA

Thin Rising Vapors by Seth Rogoff (author of First, the Raven: A Preface) is a richly psychological novel about enduring yet fragile friendship and the allure of nature and faith.
Environmental Site Plans and Development Review

Robert Sanford

The most effective way to participate in land stewardship and environmental management is to get involved in the review of proposed developments. In smaller communities, this review is primarily done by a planning board or commission made up of volunteer members, guided by professionals in certain aspects such as traffic, historic preservation, civil engineering, water supply, and wastewater disposal. In larger communities, professional planning staff with the assistance of municipal engineers conducts the review, which will then be presented to the planning commission. In either case, everyone—officials, volunteers, reviewers, consultants, neighbors, and the public in general—needs to know what is being proposed. The site plan itself is the primary tool for understanding the proposal.
Intoxication, Modernity, and Colonialism: Freud’s Industrial Unconscious, Benjamin’s Hashish Mimesis

Dušan I. Bjelić Ph.D.

This book depicts how Freud’s cocaine and Benjamin’s hashish illustrate two critiques of modernity and two messianic emancipations through the pleasures of intoxicating discourse. Freud discovered the “libido” and “unconscious” in the industrial mimetic scheme of cocaine, whereas Benjamin found an inspiration for his critique of phantasmagoria and its variant psychoanalysis in hashish’s mimesis. In addition, as part of the history of colonialism, both drugs generated two distinct colonial discourses and, consequently, two different understandings of the emancipatory powers of pleasure, the unconscious, and dreams. After all, great ideas don't liberate; they intoxicate.
Marsden Hartley's Maine

Donna M. Cassidy Ph.D., Elizabeth Finch, and Randall R. Griffey

Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) was a well-traveled American modernist painter, poet, and essayist, but it is his life-long artistic engagement with his home state of Maine that defines his career. Maine served as a creative springboard, a locus of memory and longing, a refuge, and a means of communion with other artists, such as Winslow Homer, who painted there. This is the first book to look at the artist's complex relationship with the Pine Tree State, providing a nuanced understanding of Hartley's impressive range in over 80 works, from the early Post-Impressionist interpretations of seasonal change to the late depictions of Mount Katahdin, the most dramatic and enduring series in his oeuvre.00Exhibition: The Met Breuer, New York, USA (14.03-18.06.2017); Colby College Museum, Waterville, USA (18.07-12.11.2017)
Manning the High Seat: Seiðr as Self-Making in Contemporary Norse Neopaganisms

Megan Goodwin PhD

Chapter 7 from Magic in the Modern World: Strategies of Repression and Legitimization, edited by Marco Edward Bever and Randall Styers.

More about this title:

This collection of essays considers the place of magic in the modern world, first by exploring the ways in which modernity has been defined in explicit opposition to magic and superstition, and then by illuminating how modern proponents of magic have worked to legitimize their practices through an overt embrace of evolving forms such as esotericism and supernaturalism.
All About Process: The Theory and Discourse of Modern Artistic Labor

Kim Grant PhD

In recent years, many prominent and successful artists have claimed that their primary concern is not the artwork they produce but the artistic process itself. In this volume, Kim Grant analyzes this idea and traces its historical roots, showing how changing concepts of artistic process have played a dominant role in the development of modern and contemporary art.

This astute account of the ways in which process has been understood and addressed examines canonical artists such as Monet, Cézanne, Matisse, and De Kooning, as well as philosophers and art theorists such as Henri Focillon, R. G. Collingwood, and John Dewey. Placing “process art” within a larger historical context, Grant looks at the changing relations of the artist’s labor to traditional craftsmanship and industrial production, the status of art as a commodity, the increasing importance of the body and materiality in art making, and the nature and significance of the artist’s role in modern society. In doing so, she shows how process is an intrinsic part of aesthetic theory that connects to important contemporary debates about work, craft, and labor.

Comprehensive and insightful, this synthetic study of process in modern and contemporary art reveals how artists’ explicit engagement with the concept fits into a broader narrative of the significance of art in the industrial and postindustrial world.
Catastrophic Consequences: The Link Between Rural Opioid Use and HIV/AIDS

Jennifer Lenardson MHS and Mary Lindsey Smith PhD, MSW

This chapter from HIV/AIDS in Rural Communities compares the rural–urban prevalence of HIV and opioid use, treatment, and harm reduction, and highlights efforts to control HIV and opioid use in rural states and communities. Rural persons who use opioids appear to have lower perceived risks of contracting HIV and lower perceived consequences associated with heroin use. Close social networks in rural communities and high-risk sex and injection drug use practices may facilitate exposure and transmission of HIV. Rural persons who use opioids may experience numerous potential barriers to HIV and substance abuse treatment and harm reduction activities. Given the challenges of studying a small population of opioid users and dealing with confidential information like HIV status and drug use, studies comparing rural and urban persons within the same state or nationwide will be important going forward.
The ‘Other Scene’ of Political Anthropology: Between Transindividuality and Equaliberty

Jason Read PhD

This collection explores Balibar’s rethinking of the connections between subjection and subjectivity by tracing the genealogies of these concepts in their discursive history. The 12 essays provide an overview of Balibar’s work after his collaboration with Althusser. They explain and expand his framework; in particular, by restoring Arabic and Islamic thought to the conversation on the citizen subject. The collection includes two previously untranslated essays by Balibar himself on Carl Schmitt and Thomas Hobbes.
Work and Precarity

Jason Read PhD

Chapter 16 from A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory, edited by Imre Szeman, Sarah Blacker, and Justin Sully.

More about this chapter:

The current economic crisis has returned work to the center of politics. This return is ambiguous and contradictory. Following Kathi Weeks’ discussion of the antinomies of work, this chapter examines three contradictions of work through Hegel, Marx, and Spinoza. Hegel explores the contradiction between the ethical and economic dimension of work; Marx investigates the contradiction between labor as an individual commodity and a cooperative endeavor; and Spinoza makes possible an examination of the activity and passivity of work, its relation to the affects of hope and fear. The sensibility of precarity can then be understood as siding with one contradiction against the others, emphasizing the ethical, individual, and passive dimension of labor. A movement against precarity must stress the economic, collective, and active dimension of labor.
First, the Raven: A Preface

Seth Rogoff

Sy Kirschbaum has spent almost twenty years in Prague translating legendary Czech dissident Jan Horak’s samizdat masterpiece, Blue, Red, Gray. On the cusp of finishing, he is called back to his Maine hometown to see his troubled former lover, Ida Fields, now the wife of their childhood friend Gabe Slatky. But before he can see her, Sy must meet with Gabe for an evening at a local bar, an encounter that becomes a test of their old friendship and their dueling accounts of reality. In the conversation that follows, narratives of past and present—of art and life—interweave with perfect inevitability, yet with unpredictable, even shocking consequences, spiraling Sy and Gabe into confusion, doubt, and despair, without quite eroding, perhaps, the possibility of hope.

First, the Raven: A Preface is a quietly yet profoundly radical work, as ingenious as a print by Escher or a Möbius strip: the Reader must glide along its whole immaculately ramified length before realizing how deeply life, despite its unceasing, nearly flawless appearance of normalcy, is upside down.
Walking

Henry David Thoreau and Adam Tuchinsky

Introduction by Adam Tuchinsky

"In Wildness is the preservation of the World," wrote Henry David Thoreau in his iconic deathbed essay "Walking." Published posthumously in 1862, "Walking" became a seminal influence in the environmental movement. "Above all," wrote Thoreau, "we cannot afford not to live in the present." He extolled walking as a delightful and necessary idleness, an antidote to the burdens of civilization, a means of immersing ourselves in nature and awakening to the moment. "Walking" is widely recognized as Thoreau's "other" masterpiece, Walden in a more concise form. Each reading of "Walking" offers new epiphanies from a writer and thinker who, two centuries after his birth in 1817, remains a towering figure in American nature writing. In the introduction to this book, Adam Tuchinsky accessibly and engagingly unpacks the essay's nineteenth-century associations and highlights the startling modernity of its sentiments.
Brush, Seal and Abacus: Troubled Vitality in Late Ming China’s Economic Heartland, 1500–1644

Jie Zhao PhD

This book is a study of the social and cultural change in Ming China's lower Yangzi delta region from about 1500 to 1644. It takes three social groups—literati, scholar-officials, and merchants—as the framework for discussing the political, socio-economic, and cultural forces that coalesced and reinforced one another to influence and facilitate the region's change. A still wider perspective reveals how the region's political ties with the state and commercial links with external markets impacted the region for better and for worse. The book also discusses the literati's reflection and discourse, which their participation in the change generated, on the issues of morality, money, politics, and disorder. The book evokes the richly textured social and cultural life of Ming China's heartland in an age of commercial and cultural vigor, which then descended into distress and despair. For scholars and for others conversant with Chinese history, and Ming history in particular, the extensive use of literati sources and the references to contemporary scholarship will be of interest.
Research Literacy: A primer for understanding and using research

Jeffrey S. Beaudry PhD and Lynne Miller

Preparing students to become informed, critical consumers of research, this accessible text builds essential skills for understanding research reports, evaluating the implications for evidence-based practice, and communicating findings to different audiences. It demystifies qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods designs and provides step-by-step procedures for judging the strengths and limitations of any study. Excerpts from real research reports are used as opportunities to develop methodological knowledge and practice analytic skills. Based on sound pedagogic principles, the text is structured for diverse learning styles: visual learners (concept maps, icons), active learners (building-block exercises and templates for writing), and story learners (examples, reading guides, and reflections).
Maine Photography: A History, 1840-2015

Elizabeth M. Bischof, Susan Danly, and Earle G. Shettleworth Jr.

Maine has always played a rich and varied role in the art of photography. For over a century, photographers, like other artists, have made their way to Maine to capture the natural beauty and human culture of the state. So, too, have many photographers come from Maine, and many contributions by Mainers have been made to the medium. Maine in Photography is the first comprehensive overview of the history of photography in the state. Providing basic knowledge of the most important people and institutions to have promoted photography, this volume also studies the ways in which photography has informed the understanding of the social and cultural history of Maine.

Beginning with the earliest daguerreotype portraits of the 1840s, this history traces the growth of the medium—emphasizing key contributions, such as the Stanley brothers’ invention of the dry plate process—through to the present. Key topics addressed throughout the book include the importance of photography in documenting labor and economic life, the close relationship between photography and the growth of tourism, and the role of Maine photographers in advancing the medium as a fine art form. Published in conjunction with the Maine Photo Project, this is a unique and timely addition to the body of work on the importance of Maine to American art.
Teaching an online course on Sexual Harassment [Book Chapter]

Susan Fineran PhD, LICSW

The frequency of sexual assault on college campuses is startlingly high. Notwithstanding this fact, most campus officials are not trained in the psychology of the victimization process, while most students are not aware of their reporting options. A practical guide to sexual assault at colleges and universities, this book integrates theories and empirical research with information about legislation and techniques to help college administrators deal with—and prevent—these disturbing offenses.

The work brings together a team of experts who discuss various types of assault, including rape, stalking, intimate partner violence, and sexual harassment, and detail the legal, educational, and federal responses to such events on college campuses. They address federal and state laws, including new bills being proposed in Congress, and present research on the physical and psychological dimensions of sexual assault. Perhaps most important, the book shows how human resource techniques and principles can be used to establish preventative measures and to respond appropriately when sexual assault does occur. Students' accounts of prevention training and education enhance the scholarly and legal contributions to this important—and timely—volume.