The Troubled Encounter

What was it like to be colonized by foreigners? Highlighting a region in central Congo, in the center of sub-Saharan Africa, Being Colonized places Africans at the heart of the story. In a richly textured history that will appeal to general readers and students as well as to scholars, the distinguished historian Jan Vansina offers not just accounts of colonial administrators, missionaries, and traders, but the varied voices of a colonized people. Vansina uncovers the history revealed in local news, customs, gossip, and even dreams, as related by African villagers through archival documents, material culture, and oral interviews. Vansina’s case study of the colonial experience is the realm of Kuba, a kingdom in Congo about the size of New Jersey—and two-thirds the size of its colonial master, Belgium. The experience of its inhabitants is the story of colonialism, from its earliest manifestations to its tumultuous end. What happened in Kuba happened to varying degrees throughout Africa and other colonized regions: racism, economic exploitation, indirect rule, Christian conversion, modernization, disease and healing, and transformations in gender relations. The Kuba, like others, took their own active part in history, responding to the changes and calamities that colonization set in motion. Vansina follows the region’s inhabitants from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, when a new elite emerged on the eve of Congo’s dramatic passage to independence.

For too long we’ve lacked a compact, inexpensive, authoritative, and compulsively readable book that offers American readers a clear, informative, and inspiring narrative account of their country. Such a fresh retelling of the American story is especially needed today, to shape and deepen young Americans’ sense of the land they inhabit, help them to understand its roots and share in its memories, all the while equipping them for the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship in American society The existing texts simply fail to tell that story with energy and conviction. Too often they reflect a fragmented outlook that fails to convey to American readers the grand trajectory of their own history. This state of affairs cannot continue for long without producing serious consequences. A great nation needs and deserves a great and coherent narrative, as an expression of its own self-understanding and its aspirations; and it needs to be able to convey that narrative to its young effectively. Of course, it goes without saying that such a narrative cannot be a fairy tale of the past. It will not be convincing if it is not truthful. But as Land of Hope brilliantly shows, there is no contradiction between a truthful account of the American past and an inspiring one. Readers of Land of Hope will find both in its pages.

Insightful digs into human nature. -- Lori Truzy, Blue Mango Images. A raw exposition on the fallibility of humanity. -- Erin Bernstein, author.

This book is written for students and clinicians who want to learn about adolescent behavioral health and psychosocial development. It focuses on the experiences of culturally diverse adolescents and families including, but not limited to, diversity based on race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, spirituality, ability/disability status, age, nationality, language, and socioeconomic status. Written from a bioecological and strength-based perspective, it views adolescents as having the power to initiate growth and recover from setbacks.

The American church avoids lament. But lament is a missing, essential component of Christian faith. Soong-Chan Rah's prophetic exposition of the book of Lamentations provides a biblical and theological lens for examining the church's relationship with a suffering world. Hear the prophet's lament as the necessary corrective for Christianity's future.

"Fourteen-year-old Jack falls under the spell of a delinquent Florida neighbor and gets way more trouble than he bargained for"--

Current therapeutic practice is grounded in traditional theories of psychotherapy, such as the theories that underlie cognitive-behavioural, psychodynamic and person-centred practice. But none of these approaches has been proven to be more effective than any other, leaving the therapist with an ethical and professional dilemma: how do you advocate and practise one theory with your clients, when a completely different theoretical approach is being successfully practised down the road? In this book Campbell Purton argues that psychotherapy and counselling theories fail to provide adequate justification for their practice. Part 1 highlights the weaknesses and dangers that underlie traditional counselling theories and their derivatives, including psychodynamic, cognitive behavioural, existential and neuroscience approaches. Having unpicked these theories, Part 2 goes on to develop an exciting new way of thinking about therapy that does not rely on theory - one that can be likened to a 'common sense' approach to therapeutic practice. This book poses important questions and offers unique insight for anyone studying or practising in the field of counselling and psychotherapy.

Peer-to-peer exchange is a type of sharing that involves the transfer of valued resources, such as goods and services, among members of a local community and/or between parties who have not met before the exchange encounter. It involves online systems that allow strangers to exchange in ways that were previously confined to the realm of kinship and friendship. Through the examples in this book, we encounter attempts to foster the sharing of goods and services in local communities and consider the intricacies of sharing homes temporarily with strangers (also referred to as hospitality exchange or network hospitality). Some of the exchange arrangements discussed involve money while others explicitly ban participants from using it. All rely on digital technologies, but the trickiest challenges have more to do with social interaction than technical features. This book explores what makes peer-to-peer exchange challenging, with an emphasis on reciprocity, closeness, and participation: How should we reciprocate? How might we manage interactions with those we encounter to attain some closeness but not too much? What keeps people from getting involved or draws them into exchange activities that they would rather avoid? This book adds to the growing body of research on exchange platforms and the sharing economy. It provides empirical examples and conceptual grounding for thinking about interpersonal challenges in peer-to-peer exchange and the efforts that are required for exchange arrangements to flourish. It offers inspiration for how we might think and design differently to better understand and support the efforts of those involved in peer-to-peer exchange. While the issues cannot be simply “solved” by technology, it matters which digital tools an exchange arrangement relies on, and even seemingly small design decisions can have a significant impact on what it is like to participate in exchange processes. The technologies that support exchange arrangements—often platforms of some sort—can be driven by differing sets of values and commitments. This book invites students and scholars in the Human–Computer Interaction community, and beyond, to envision and design alternative exchange arrangements and future economies.

The villianous George Wickham, determined to start trouble, returns to Hertfordshire and places the lives of Elizabeth and her newborn son in danger, forcing Darcy to rush to the rescue.

In this groundbreaking study based on five years of in-depth ethnographic and interdisciplinary research, Troubled in the Land of Enchantment explores the well-being of adolescents hospitalized for psychiatric care in New Mexico. Anthropologists Janis H. Jenkins and Thomas J. Csordas present a gripping picture of psychic distress, familial turmoil, and treatment under the regime of managed care that dominates the mental health care system. The authors make the case for the centrality of struggle in the lives of youth across an array of extraordinary conditions, characterized by personal anguish and structural violence. Critical to the analysis is the cultural phenomenology of existence disclosed through shifting narrative accounts by youth and their families as they grapple with psychiatric diagnosis, poverty, misogyny, and stigma in their trajectories through multiple forms of harm and sites of care. Jenkins and Csordas compellingly direct our attention to the conjunction of lived experience, institutional power, and the very possibility of having a life.