Author: Matt Sleat File Type: pdf Is political theory political enough? Or does a tendency toward abstraction, idealization, moralism, and utopianism leave contemporary political theory out of touch with real politics as it actually takes place, and hence unable to speak meaningfully to or about our world? Realist political thought, which has enjoyed a significant revival of interest in recent years, seeks to avoid such pitfalls by remaining attentive to the distinctiveness of politics and the ways its realities ought to shape how we think and act in the political realm. Politics Recovered brings together prominent scholars to develop what it might mean to theorize politics realistically. Intervening in philosophical debates such as the relationship between politics and morality and the role that facts and emotions should play in the theorization of political values, the volume addresses how a realist approach aids our understanding of pressing issues such as global justice, inequality, poverty, political corruption, the value of democracy, governmental secrecy, and demands for transparency. Contributors open up fruitful dialogues with a variety of other realist approaches, such as feminist theory, democratic theory, and international relations. By exploring the nature and prospects of realist thought, Politics Recovered shows how political theory can affirm reality in order to provide meaningful and compelling answers to the fundamental questions of political life. **ContributorsDuncan Bell & Richard Bellamy & Elizabeth Frazer & Michael Freeden & William A. Galston & Charles Larmore & Alison McQueen & John Medearis & Glen Newey & David Owen & Mark Philp & Paul Sagar & Rahul Sagar & William Scheuerman

Author: Eva Bendix Petersen File Type: pdf This book offers critical explorations of how the psy-disciplines, Michel Foucaults collective term for psychiatry, psychology and psycho-analysis, play out in contemporary educational spaces. With a strong focus on Foucaults theories, it critically investigates how the psy-disciplines continue to influence education, both regulating and shaping behaviour and morality. The book provides insight into different educational contexts and concerns across a childs educational lifespan early childhood education, inclusive education, special education, educational leadership, social media, university, and beyond to enable reflection and critique of the implications of psy-based knowledge and practice. With chapters by a mixture of established and emerging international scholars in the field this is an interdisciplinary and authoritative study into the role of the psy-disciplines in the education system. Providing vivid illustrations from throughout the educational lifespan the book serves as an invaluable tool for reflection and critique of the implications of psy-based practice, and will be of particular interest to academics and scholars in the field of education policy and psychology. **Review From silence to special education, from learners to leadership, from positive psychology to gendered, classed and racialized pathologisation, this engaging and creatively constructed book shows how psychological practices work to perpetuate and naturalise dominant hegemonic cultural assumptions. Not only is this a critical intervention, but it offers strategies for disrupting, interrupting and even queering or rewriting the role of the psy-complex in contemporary technologies and rationalities of rule. A must-read for all critical educators and practitioners. (Erica Burman, Manchester University, UK) This volume brings a welcome updating of the application of the analysis of the Psy-complex to contemporary education. It deserves to be widely read across the educational field. (Valerie Walkerdine, Cardiff University, UK) From the Back Cover This book offers critical explorations of how the psy-disciplines, Michel Foucaults collective term for psychiatry, psychology and psycho-analysis, play out in contemporary educational spaces. With a strong focus on Foucaults theories, it critically investigates how the psy-disciplines continue to influence education, both regulating and shaping behaviour and morality. The book provides insight into different educational contexts and concerns across a childs educational lifespan early childhood education, inclusive education, special education, educational leadership, social media, university, and beyond to enable reflection and critique of the implications of psy-based knowledge and practice. With chapters by a mixture of established and emerging international scholars in the field this is an interdisciplinary and authoritative study into the role of the psy-disciplines in the education system. Providing vivid illustrations from throughout the educational lifespan the book serves as an invaluable tool for reflection and critique of the implications of psy-based practice, and will be of particular interest to academics and scholars in the field of education policy and psychology. Eva Bendix Petersen is Professor in the Department of People and Technology at Roskilde University, Denmark. Her research explores the formation of subjectivity in educational contexts in relation to local and global policy discourses. Zsuzsa Millei is a research fellow at the Space and Political Agency Research Group at the University of Tampere, Finland and Senior Lecturer in early childhood and comparative and international education at The University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research examines how children are positioned and participate as political subjects and how childrens political subjectivities are formed.

Author: Donald S. Lopez File Type: pdf The Lotus Sutra is arguably the most famous of all Buddhist scriptures. Composed in India in the first centuries of the Common Era, it is renowned for its inspiring message that all beings are destined for supreme enlightenment. Here, Donald Lopez provides an engaging and accessible biography of this enduring classic. Lopez traces the many roles the Lotus Sutra has played in its travels through Asia, Europe, and across the seas to America. The story begins in India, where it was one of the early Mahayana sutras, which sought to redefine the Buddhist path. In the centuries that followed, the text would have a profound influence in China and Japan, and would go on to play a central role in the European discovery of Buddhism. It was the first Buddhist sutra to be translated from Sanskrit into a Western languageinto French in 1844 by the eminent scholar Eugene Burnouf. That same year, portions of the Lotus Sutra appeared in English in The Dial, the journal of New Englands Transcendentalists. Lopez provides a balanced account of the many controversies surrounding the text and its teachings, and describes how the book has helped to shape the popular image of the Buddha today. He explores how it was read by major literary figures such as Henry David Thoreau and Gustave Flaubert, and how it was used to justify self-immolation in China and political extremism in Japan. Concise and authoritative, this is the essential introduction to the life and afterlife of a timeless masterpiece. **Review With scholarly acumen, contextual nuance, and adaptive storytelling, he deftly traces the historical trajectory of the Lotus Sutra by examining various people, places, and political contexts that influenced the transmission of the text. . . . A great pedagogical tool, Lopezs book is also an enjoyable read for anyone interested in Buddhism and Eastern religion, or the global reach of a single sacred text.--*Publishers Weekly* From the Back Cover This engaging yet sobering study tells the picaresque tale of a most curious text that continues to fire the devotional imagination of millions of Buddhists worldwide. Recounted with scholarly rigor and postmodern irony, this biography reveals how the story of a book can be just as intriguing, quirky, and unpredictable as that of any living, breathing person.--Stephen Batchelor, author of *After Buddhism* The Lotus Sutra is both a key scripture of Indian Mahayana Buddhism as well as a mainstay of the forms of Buddhism that emerged in China, Korea, and Japan. But despite numerous translations into English, this text remains poorly appreciated and understood in the West. With his usual literary aplomb and vast erudition, Lopez has written an invaluable and eminently readable introduction to this demanding work. His lucid exposition of the history, transmission, reception, and significance of this justly famous scripture will be appreciated by anyone interested in Buddhisms sophisticated literary legacy.--Robert Sharf, University of California, Berkeley Highly recommended. In Lopezs easy-to-read biography of the Lotus Sutra, readers will find an informative and provocative account of the many lives of this influential scripture. It not only introduces the key themes in the history of Buddhism, but also provides an invaluable overview of the development of Buddhist studies in the West.--William M. Bodiford, University of California, Los Angeles In this lively and engaging book, Lopez presents a concise account of the Lotus Sutra and the high points in its history of reception in China, Japan, and the modern West. Even for seasoned Lotus specialists, there are some wonderful surprises here.--Jacqueline I. Stone, Princeton University Such a well-written, smart, and engaging treatment of the Lotus Sutra could have only been written by a scholar with the type of expansive vision of the Buddhist tradition that Lopez commands. Lopez provides insight into the sutras challenging doctrines, describes the controversies it sparked, and tells a compelling story about its role in the early days of Western engagement with Buddhism. This book will be enjoyed by general readers, although specialists will also come away from it with fresh new perspectives on this Buddhist classic.--James Robson, Harvard University

Author: Joanna Hofer-Robinson File Type: pdf Dickens and Demolition examines how tropes, characters, or extracts from Dickens fiction were repurposed as a portable terminology in arguments for large-scale demolition and redevelopment projects in London during his lifetime. Commentators with public voices repeatedly mobilised a Dickensian vocabulary to communicate their opinions about how and where Londons built environment should be improved in the mid-nineteenth century, or to justify proposed alterations. In analysing allusions to Dickens in a variety of archival sources, including dramatizations, press reports, political debates, and the visual arts, this book asks what cultural work is performed by literary afterlives, and whether we can trace their material effects in the spaces we inhabit. **