Books, magazines, reports, and other long publications produced by faculty, staff, and students affiliated with Mississippi State University's College of Arts and Sciences.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
