Brainless Sameness

This book offers a careful look at how we came to have our traditional education system, and how it met the needs of a different time. By looking back at the past we can take on the task of change without casting blame, but with understanding. We will consider the systems design of the curriculum driven one-size-fits-all educational model, why it no longer meets our needs, and how to devise a system which can deliver a better future for our children and for ourselves as educators.

A tremendous amount of money is being steered toward personalized learning (PL) initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels, and it is important to understand the return on the investment in students’ futures. It is only through rigorous discussions that educators and policymakers will be able to determine if PL is a passing fad or if it possesses the staying power necessary to show a positive impact on student achievement. Evaluation of Principles and Best Practices in Personalized Learning is a critical scholarly publication that explores the modern push for schools to implement PL environments and the continuing research to understand the best strategies and implementation methods for personalizing education. It seeks to begin creating a standardized language and standardized approach to the PL initiative and to investigate the implications it has on the educational system. Additionally, this book adds to the professional discussion of PL by looking at both the advantages and disadvantages of PL, the teacher’s role in PL, creating a PL program to scale, the role of technology and PL, the special education population and PL, emerging research on PL, and case studies involving PL. Featuring research on a wide range of topics such as blended learning, preservice teachers, and special education, this book is ideal for teachers, administrators, academicians, policymakers, researchers, and students.

On Human Conflict excavates the philosophical foundations of war and peace in order to determine whether wars can ever be ended. It ranges over relevant mathematical models, Hobbes’s natural philosophy, theories of causality, biological and cultural evolution, general systems theory, Buddhism, globalization, and futurology.

This book discusses the themes of personhood and personal identity. It argues that while there is a metaphysical answer to the question of personal identity, there is no metaphysical answer to the question of what constitutes a person. The author argues against both body-mind dualism and physicalism and also against the idea that there is some metaphysically real category of persons distinct from the category of human beings or human organisms. Instead, the author presents neutral-monist, autopoietic-enactivist kind of metaphysics of the human being, and a relational, and completely human-dependent notion of a person. The tools used in these arguments include conceptual argumentation and empirical case studies. Using both personal experiences and studies of cultures all over the world, the author examines dualism between mind and body. The author discusses real people who seem to live a Cartesian life, as somehow disembodied minds as well as the concept of the person. The author uses the concluding chapters to present their own views arguing that questions about our identity should be separated from questions of our personhood as well as the concept of personhood. This volume is of interest to scholars of philosophy of mind.

The queue was getting shorter, and I too was getting closer to something. It was a big cloud, a hazy one. Everyone was calling this cloud with a name as they were coming closer to it. I wasn't able to hear it clearly from a distance, but as I reached pretty close, I heard the name "God." Yes, God was what I heard. The small hazy clouds were calling this huge hazy cloud as God. What is this God? I kept thinking as I was moving closer to it. My turn came, and I was in front of it. The first thing I said to it was God! And to this it replied, "Yes, son." I was so surprised, frightened, and nervous. I wasn't able to understand the reason for which I called it a god. May be it was some automated command fed into all of us. Then this god showed me a golden gate just behind it. It was this huge gate, with beautiful carved images on it as if it was telling a story about someone or something. God bent down to its knees and started telling me, or I should say, started giving me a series of instructions.

The first book-length study of Bersani’s work, tracing the unfolding of his onto-ethics/aesthetics amidst numerous literary, artistic, and philosophical influences. Since his first publications in the late 1950s, Leo Bersani’s work has influenced numerous scholarly fields, from studies of French modernism and realist fiction to psychoanalytic criticism and film theory. It has occasionally helped precipitate the emergence of new disciplinary fields, such as queer theory in the late 1980s. The Essentialist Villain is the first book-length study of this impressively rich oeuvre. Mikko Tuhkanen tracks the unfolding of Bersani’s onto-ethics/aesthetics, paying particular attention to his persistent references to “essence,” a concept central to classical speculative philosophy, which has fallen into distinct disfavor since the emergence of deconstructive thought. Because of his early influences—particularly Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy—Bersani remains an ontologist through decades when deconstruction seems to have all but disallowed any thought of being. Tuhkanen also locates Bersani’s thought amidst numerous literary, artistic, and philosophical interlocutors, including Deleuze, Freud, Proust, Laplanche, Beckett, Baudelaire, Genet, Leibniz, and others. “This very impressive book provides a full-scale assessment of Leo Bersani’s half-century of thinking and writing, at the same time as it offers a reassessment of our contemporary critical landscape. It is rare that a book on a single thinker can do that, but Tuhkanen has accomplished a tremendous amount of intellectual work here. A brilliant book on a brilliant thinker. I learned a great deal from it and recommend it highly.” — Tim Dean, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign “The Essentialist Villain offers a wonderfully original and convincing assessment of the speculative power of Leo Bersani’s oeuvre. Identifying a ‘homo-monadology’ at its core, Tuhkanen details the complex and shifting role sameness has played throughout. By situating him at the proper onto-aesthetic level of his thought, this study positions Bersani among the leading independent thinkers of our era.” — Joan Copjec, Brown University Mikko Tuhkanen is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University. His books include Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond; Queer Times, Queer Becomings (coedited with E. L. McCallum); and The American Optic: Psychoanalysis, Critical Race Theory, and Richard Wright, all published by SUNY Press.

1970: Fourteen-year-old Tony becomes seduced by Britain’s neo-Nazi movement, sucked into a world of brutal racist violence and bizarre ritual. It’s an environment in which he must hide his sexuality, in which every encounter is potentially deadly. 2003: James is a young writer, living with his boyfriend. In search of a subject, he begins looking into the Far Right in Britain and its secret gay membership. He becomes particularly fascinated by Nicky Crane, one of the leaders of the neo-Nazi movement who came out in 1992 before dying a year later of AIDS. The two narrative threads of this extraordinarily assured and ambitious first novel follow Tony through the seventies, eighties, and nineties, as the nationalist movement splinters and weakens; and James through a year in which he becomes dangerously immersed in his research. After risky flirtations with individuals on far right websites, he starts receiving threatening phone calls—the first in a series of unexpected events that ultimately cause the lives of these two very different men to unforgettably intersect. Children of the Sun is a work of great imaginative sympathy and range—a novel of unblinking honesty but also of deep feeling, which illuminates the surprisingly thin line that separates aggression from tenderness.

Mediating Madness examines how mediations of madness emerge, disappear and interleave, only to re-emerge at unexpected moments. Drawing on social and cultural histories of madness, history of art, and popular journalism, the book offers a unique interdisciplinary understanding of historical and contemporary media representations of madness.