Books, magazines, reports, and other long publications produced by Mississippi State University faculty, staff, and students.
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Conversations with Jesmyn Ward
Kemeshia Randle Swanson
Jesmyn Ward (b. 1977) is arguably one of today’s most important authors. Although often compared to William Faulkner, Ward and her writings have done anything but live in that shadow since the 2008 debut of her first novel Where the Line Bleeds. She has produced four novels and a memoir that are equally harrowing and heartening, and she is the recipient of numerous major literary awards and fellowships, including two National Book Awards, for Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017).
Spanning from 2009 to the present, the interviews collected in Conversations with Jesmyn Ward display a master artist with a poetic command for words. Ward’s personality and writing style could be characterized as gentle, passionate, fastidious, queer, and brutally honest, as her soft-spoken voice and lyrical prose express a passion for the world so large and consuming that it often emanates as rage or sadness but always leaves readers with a bit of hope. She speaks at length about grief, her writing process, and a love-hate relationship with her home state of Mississippi and the South, as well as the influence that her family, hip-hop music and culture, and vigorous childhood reading have on her writing.
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Promoting Equity in Approximations of Practice for Mathematics Teachers
Carrie Wilkerson Lee, Liza Bondurant, Bima Sapkota, and Heather Howell
Within the field of mathematics teacher (PST) education, a profound challenge echoes—the persistent gap between theoretical understanding and practical application. This lingering divide raises a critical concern, one that finds its focus in the exploration of transformative tools known as approximations of practice. These tools aim to provide a realistic and contextualized environment for PSTs to cultivate their teaching skills. However, the broader, often overlooked issue permeating this educational terrain is the question of equity in mathematics instruction—an issue that this book endeavors to unravel and reshape, positioning equity at the forefront of pedagogical considerations. Promoting Equity in Approximations of Practice for Mathematics Teachers, a compelling work that not only delves into the transformative role of approximations but also champions equity as a cornerstone in reshaping the landscape of mathematics education.
This groundbreaking work has a dual objective—firstly, to furnish mathematics teacher educators and researchers with a comprehensive overview of the current landscape of approximations in mathematics education. It moves beyond a mere survey, encouraging readers to critically analyze frameworks and design choices that either foreground or dismiss equity in these pedagogical spaces. Divided into three sections, the book delves into the spectrum of work characterizing approximations in mathematics teacher education. The first section surveys diverse approaches, acknowledging the current lack of focus on equity. The second section critically examines the intersection of equity and approximations, fostering collaborations between experts in mathematics education and equity-focused researchers. The third section takes a forward-looking stance, envisioning the future of equity-focused approximations in mathematics education.
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Impact of High Night Temperature on Plant Biology: Toward Sustainable Plant Adaptation to Climate Change
Rajesh Kumar Singhal, Raju Bheemanahalli, Saurabh Pandey, and M. D. Pratibha
The persistence of higher night-time temperatures (HNT) over long periods during the crop cycle can potentially impact a wide range of growth and developmental stages. The major processes drastically affected by night-time warming, such as photosynthesis, respiration, etc., ultimately cause yield and economic losses. Despite this, HNT has not been significantly researched regarding its impact on plants. This new book provides a comprehensive understanding of the physiology of night-time warming, trait responses, advanced tools for phenotyping, and alleviation and mitigation strategies.
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College Sports: A History
Eric A. Moyen and John R. Thelin
In College Sports, historians Eric A. Moyen and John R. Thelin tell the intriguing story of the success--and excess--of American college sports from their inception to today. Arguing that the modern American university's structure spurred the growth of big-time sports, Moyen and Thelin also highlight the treatment of marginalized groups in athletics and the role that commercialization and the media have played in shaping college sports. Using a wealth of secondary resources, archival records, newspaper articles, and oral histories, Moyen and Thelin offer a chronological account of the popularity, success, and continued challenges of college sports. Most scholarship has portrayed athletics as an anomaly within higher education, but history reveals that college sports enjoy a symbiotic relationship with universities. Reform and a return to a purely amateur model have rarely been a compelling option for those institutions that are successful in commercialized big-time college sports. At the same time, most student-athletes compete in a very different model. And despite their progressive posturing, colleges have been slow to fully adopt civil rights and social justice issues. When full participation was finally extended to women and minorities, it generally meant a move away from the amateur model into a commercial enterprise. By examining key events at specific universities, athletic conferences, and the NCAA, Moyen and Thelin trace how the media and sports marketing have created an incredibly successful financial model for schools in big-time conferences. Yet this model has also created a precarious fiscal situation for hundreds of other institutions. This provocative and refreshing take on sports in American universities provides the context in which to understand--and improve upon--the current landscape of intercollegiate athletics.
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Infrastructure in Video Games
Daniel Punday
This book will sketch the dynamics of infrastructure in video games, focusing on the relationship between game rules, fictional world, and player interaction. It will discuss a variety of commercial video games, both mainstream and somewhat niche, that use infrastructure in different ways: Control, Wolfenstein, Fallout, This War of Mine, Exocolonist, Cyberpunk, and Frostpunk.
Video games offer a particularly rich field for thinking about the relationship between narrative and infrastructure. The infrastructures that exist in the fictional worlds of these games define the experience of play in a very direct way: how players are instantiated in the game, how they move around the play space, the resources that are available, and so on. And those infrastructures in turn very directly definite the nature of the fictional world. In contrast to literary fiction, were infrastructures might remain on the periphery of some stories, by virtue of the centrality of player interaction video games are inherently infrastructural.
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Fake News in Contemporary Science and Politics: A Requiem for the Real?
Keith Moser
This transdisciplinary book investigates the profound repercussions of living in a post-truth world in which "alternative facts" and post-truth knowledge claims, often bordering on the absurd, have replaced the real in the collective imagination of millions of people around the planet. Through discussions on climate change denial, the anti-vaccination movement, the January 6th Insurrection and the Russia-Ukraine War, this study explores the gravity of the current 'infodemic,' or the increasing inability of a large segment of the population to distinguish between reality and misrepresentation, and the destabilizing impact this infodemic has on democratic models of governance around the globe, coinciding with the rise of autocratic forms of populism.
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Maverick Feminist: To Be Female and Black in a Country Founded Upon Violence and Respectability
Kemeshia Randle Swanson
Beginning with their forced introduction to American soil, Black women have relied on maverick-like characteristics to survive. And yet, these liberating qualities have been repeatedly disparaged by the masses in favor of an elitist politics of respectability. In Maverick Feminist: To Be Female and Black in a Country Founded upon Violence and Respectability, scholar Kemeshia Randle Swanson examines the extent to which the politics of respectability diminish joy and increase sorrow throughout the lifespan of Black women. By rejecting this damaging standard in society, Black women can wholly and attentively assist in the obliteration of racist, sexist, classist, and ableist oppression. But first, they must work towards becoming self-identified, self-actualized, and self-sexualized.
Bridging the gap between women in both the streets and the academy, Maverick Feminist expands the traditional understandings of activism and enlarges discussions about Black female sexuality. Swanson emphasizes sexuality’s significance to the literary and sociopolitical success of Black women of the past and in this contemporary climate. Through close readings and critical analyses of fiction, nonfiction, and popular culture, Swanson argues that #BlackGirlMagic and racial progression require rejecting respectability politics and developing an intimate appreciation of self. Maverick Feminist examines texts by and about bold Black women, including Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever, Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Sapphire’s PUSH, Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Terry McMillan’s Getting to Happy, and Michelle Obama’s Becoming.
Maverick Feminist offers hope concerning the growing divide between scholars and the communities about which they theorize. The book celebrates centuries of agency and control that Black women have mustered and maintained in a world that seems to want nothing more than to see them prone and powerless. Ultimately, maverick feminism provides a freer means of living out, evaluating, understanding, and improving the lives of Black women.
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Artemis, Eve, and the Image of God: A Case of Mistaken Identity in Paul’s Ephesian Marriage Code
Joseph A. Brennan
What has gone so terribly wrong in Ephesus that Paul feels compelled to write the longest marriage code in the New Testament? 1 Peter only has seven verses about marriage. Colossians only has two. Titus only has two. Why does Ephesians have thirteen? Did Paul wish to set in stone the nature of gender relationships for all of time? Was he trying to ensure the survival of the emerging church amidst harsh Hellenistic realities of hierarchic marriage? Or did he have something else in mind? This is a book about the Ephesians 5 marriage code, the goddess Artemis, Eve, and the image of God in the believer. It explores the adverse influence of Artemis upon the Ephesian believers' thought world, why Paul raises up Eve and Adam as the example of loving marriage (5:31), what Paul thought the image of God looked like in the believer, and why some Ephesian believers thought differently. Dr Brennan argues that the primary purpose behind Ephesians 5:21-33 was to evangelize non-believing Ephesian onlookers to an ideal of marriage in Christ's new kingdom that far surpassed their personal experience in the first-century Roman world, and that Artemis was getting in the way.
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Exercise Physiology for Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation
Stanley Brown
Exercise is widely recognized for its importance as a preventive and rehabilitative health measure. Even so, the prevalence of diseases due to poor lifestyle choices is high. These statements speak volumes about the contradiction that exists between our state of knowledge regarding preventive health and the general behavior of the populace. As an academic discipline, exercise physiology is concerned with two general goals: using exercise as a research tool to explore physiological responses and adaptations and using physiological measurements to understand the stress of exercise. These general goals establish the boundaries around which scientists explore the physiology of exercise from different vantage points. This publication examines all these aspects of exercise physiology and more! Including a case study on cardiopulmonary rehabilitation.
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Pedagogies for Equitable Access: Reimagining Multilingual Education for an Uncertain World
Lourdes Cardozo-Gaibisso, Ruth Harman, Max Vazquez Dominguez, and Cory Buxton
During the COVID-19 pandemic, public health recommendations for physical distancing created an urgent need for new and remixed online and distance ways of preparing, teaching, and assessing learning practices. This new context forced teacher educators, administrators, and public policymakers around the globe to rethink, reshape, and redesign curriculum, instruction, and assessment practices and modalities. While online education has been an option available to many for decades, no other moment in recent history has demanded such a rapid shift in educational practices, impacting tens of millions of teachers and hundreds of millions of students worldwide. Fortunately, in some cases, highly innovative advances in technological resources have supported educators in designing and implementing transformative approaches. In the field of language education, educators have had to reconceptualize online instruction so that digital and other multimodal resources are designed to fully engage multilingual students in optimal and equitable learning contexts.
This edited book serves the purpose of focusing the research agendas of K-12 educators, teacher educators, and policymakers on the lessons and insights the field can gain from this crisis as we adapt to the post-pandemic future of language education. As argued over the past three years, the pandemic has exposed multiple structural issues related to accessibility, inequity, and poverty—ubiquitous issues that have existed in our societies for decades. It has also drawn attention to the notion of 'competing priorities,' challenging our ability to determine what can and cannot be done in terms of human, financial, and logistical capacity around the globe. With this focus in mind, the aim of this edited book is to provide readers with robust and systematic thinking about the multifaceted strengths and challenges that have emerged during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, informed by a critical perspective on societal power dynamics and equity, this edited book explores the following interconnected topics in multilingual/multicultural settings: (i) instructional strategies and curriculum adaptations (ii) in-service and pre-service teacher education practices (iii) classroom-based pedagogical innovations and assessment.
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Children of a Troubled Time: Growing Up With Racism in Trump's America
Margaret A. Hagerman
Publisher's description:
Kids are at the center of today’s “culture wars”—pundits, politicians, and parents alike are debating which books they should be allowed to read, which version of history they should learn in school, and what decisions they can make about their own bodies. And yet, no one asks kids what they think about these issues. In Children of a Troubled Time, award-winning sociologist Margaret A. Hagerman amplifies the voices of children who grew up during Trump’s presidency and explores how they learn about race in America today. Hagerman interviewed nearly fifty children between the ages of ten to thirteen in two dramatically different political landscapes: Mississippi and Massachusetts. Hagerman interviewed kids who identified as conservative and liberal in both places as well as kids from different racial groups. She discovered remarkably similar patterns in the ideas expressed by these children. Racism, she asserts, is not just a local or regional phenomenon: it is a broad American project affecting childhoods across the country. In Hagerman’s emotionally compelling interviews, children describe what it is like to come of age during years of deep political and racial divide, and how being a kid during the Trump era shaped their views on racism, democracy, and America as a whole. Children’s racialized emotions are also central to this book: disgust and discomfort, fear and solidarity, dominance and apathy. As administrators, teachers, and parents struggle to help children make sense of our racially and politically polarized nation, Hagerman offers concrete examples of the kinds of interventions necessary to help kids learn how to become members of a multi-racial democracy and to avoid the development of far-right thinking in the white youth of today. Children of a Troubled Time expands our understanding of how the rising generation grapples with the complexities of racism and raises critical questions about the future of American society.
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Exporting Reconstruction: Ulysses S. Grant and a New Empire of Liberty
Ryan P. Semmes
Exporting Reconstruction examines Ulysses S. Grant's Reconstruction-era policy, both foreign and domestic, as an integrated whole. Grant's vision for America's international role in the aftermath of the Civil War was best articulated in his 1869 memorandum, considering whether the United States should annex the Dominican Republic. Grant envisioned a combined domestic and foreign policy of Reconstruction, one predicated on spreading the values of liberty, equality, and the rights of citizenship to not only the Dominican Republic but also other Caribbean nations as well as to Native Americans and Chinese immigrants living in the United States but seen as aliens within the nation. Author Ryan P. Semmes interprets the Grant-era policy of Reconstruction as an all-encompassing agenda that imagined the United States as the arbiter of civil rights for the Western Hemisphere. Exporting Reconstruction shows readers that, unlike presidents before and after his administration, Grant hoped to increase not only the United States's imperial reach but also extend freedom and liberty to people beyond the borders of North America.
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Wicked Mississippi
Ryan Starrett and Joshua Keith Foreman
Authors Josh Foreman and Ryan Starrett lead readers on a descent into the darkest depths of Mississippi. From embezzler Edward Cates and his effort to avoid prosecution by faking his own death, to the hoop-skirted damsels of the antebellum South and a three-generation struggle for social supremacy, Mississippi knows its way around the seven deadly sins. The Black Knight of Mississippi Alexander McClung finally meets the duelist he can’t defeat—himself. Kiah Lincecum hunts for the easy dollar. Nellie Jackson’s Natchez bordello caters to a community’s base interests. John Law concocts America’s first Ponzi scheme with the Mississippi Bubble. The Magnolia State’s foremost food critic settles in for a famously gluttonous 31-course meal. And a wrathful scene unfolds at the Carrol County courthouse.
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Fundamentals of Kinesiology (4th ed.)
Stanley Brown
Movement is a fundamental characteristic of life. Understanding the meaning of movement in the full context of human endeavor is central to improving the quality of human experience, of life itself. Fundamentals of Kinesiology showcases the transdisciplinary nature of the academic field of study centered on movement, physical activity and sport. Three major sections of the book provide a comprehensive treatment of this diverse academic field through detailed studies of the many disciplines and professions constituting kinesiology. In Part I of the text, kinesiology is explored from historical/cultural and professional standpoints. The chapters of Part Two then provide descriptions of each of the major disciplines of kinesiology. Here students are introduced to the foundational sciences comprising each discipline. This part serves as a lead up to Part Three of the text which focuses on the professions centering on the practice of movement, physical activity, sport and exercise. Chapter 28 wraps up the text with a discussion of where kinesiology might be headed in the not too distant future. The text serves academic courses designed to introduce students of kinesiology, exercise science, sport studies, physical education, or whatever moniker is in current vogue in colleges and universities.
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Exercise Electrocardiography
Stanley Brown, Leeann Joe, and Cameron Huxford
An electrocardiogram (ECG) is a test to evaluate the heart. Surface electrodes, placed on the chest and torso, collect electrical currents propagated by the heart to the surface of the body. These currents are translated into the ECG waveform by the electrocardiograph. The ECG is then interpreted by a trained diagnostician. It is essential that students of clinical exercise physiology be able to use and interpret the ECG in medical settings. In this regard, clinical exercise physiology students usually take one course in either their undergraduate or graduate education. The course is presented as a comprehensive survey to give them the basic abilities needed to pass certification exams. This text and the course it is meant to accompany addresses the needs of the exercise physiologist working in a clinical setting and highlights static interpretation of rhythm strips and 12-lead ECGs. It includes traditional basic ECG, arrhythmia, myocardial infarction and all the other basic concepts provided through an easy-to-read approach on cardiac physiology and pathophysiology, cardiovascular testing procedures, cardiac pharmacology, and structural heart disease. Case studies are liberally spread throughout the text to present real-world scenarios for application of the knowledge gained. The text also presents the following:
- Practice strips to evaluate the ECGs
- Includes learning objectives and a glossary of key terms
- Instructor resources include PowerPoint presentations and a test bank
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Precision Agriculture GIS Technologies for Mississippi, 1st. Edition
Amelia A.A. Fox
Precision agriculture is meant to improve on-farm efficiency in hopes of ultimately increasing profitability while also protecting the environment. However, this difficult process almost always includes the proper management and interpretation of data. Therefore, it is imperative that those individuals involved in making such decisions are educated on these processes. In a data-driven world, this textbook is a great resource for those wanting to learn how to utilize their data in hopes of making better informed on-farm decisions.
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White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America
Margaret A. Hagerman
Publisher's description:
American kids are living in a world of ongoing public debates about race, daily displays of racial injustice, and for some, an increased awareness surrounding diversity and inclusion. In this heated context, sociologist Margaret A. Hagerman zeroes in on affluent, white kids to observe how they make sense of privilege, unequal educational opportunities, and police violence. In fascinating detail, Hagerman considers the role that they and their families play in the reproduction of racism and racial inequality in America. White Kids, based on two years of research involving in-depth interviews with white kids and their families, is a clear-eyed and sometimes shocking account of how white kids learn about race. In doing so, this book explores questions such as, “How do white kids learn about race when they grow up in families that do not talk openly about race or acknowledge its impact?” and “What about children growing up in families with parents who consider themselves to be ‘anti-racist’?” Featuring the actual voices of young, affluent white kids and what they think about race, racism, inequality, and privilege, White Kids illuminates how white racial socialization is much more dynamic, complex, and varied than previously recognized. It is a process that stretches beyond white parents’ explicit conversations with their white children and includes not only the choices parents make about neighborhoods, schools, peer groups, extracurricular activities, and media, but also the choices made by the kids themselves. By interviewing kids who are growing up in different racial contexts—from racially segregated to meaningfully integrated and from politically progressive to conservative—this important book documents key differences in the outcomes of white racial socialization across families. And by observing families in their everyday lives, this book explores the extent to which white families, even those with anti-racist intentions, reproduce and reinforce the forms of inequality they say they reject.
