ReSounding Poverty: Romani Music and Development Aid engages with global scholarship on development, poverty, and applied research. It addresses the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) within postsocialist neoliberal processes and analyzes the economic structures within which Romani musics circulate. Specifically, ReSounding Poverty offers a micro ethnography of economic networks that impact the daily lives of Romani musicians on the borders of the former Soviet Union and the European Union. It argues that the development aid allotted to provide economic assistance to Romani communities, when analyzed from the perspective of the performance arts, continues to marginalize the poorest among them. Through their structure and programming, NGOs choose which segments of the population are the most vulnerable and in the greatest need of assistance. Drawing on ethnographic research in development contexts, ReSounding Poverty asks who speaks for whom within the Romani rights movement today. Framing the critique of development aid in musical terms, it engages with Romani marginalization and economic deprivation through a closer listening to vocal inflections, physical vocalizations of health and disease, and emotional affect. ReSounding Poverty brings us into the back rooms of saman, mud and straw brick, houses not visited by media reporters and politicians, amplifying the cultural expressions of the Romani poor, silenced in the business of development.

Brings together the words of welfare mothers, activists and advocates, as well as scholars in a poignant and powerful challenge to the impoverishment of women.

What is child poverty, what evidence is there of such poverty in New Zealand and why does it matter? These questions regularly attract answers accompanied by conjecture and prejudice. This short book uses the latest evidence and a non-partisan approach, identifying child poverty as a critical issue for New Zealand’s future. Jonathan Boston and Simon Chapple’s succinct introduction to this challenge, drawn from their widely acclaimed full-length book Child Poverty in New Zealand and updated with new data, is essential reading.

Sound studies has emerged as a major academic field in recent times. However, much of this material remains ahistorical or focused on technological advances of sound. This book departs from previous studies by drawing out connections between sound, memory and the senses, and how they emerge within a variety of historical contexts.

A startling analysis of the killing of over 500 women in Ju rez to help readers understand the presence of suffering and evil. Making expert use of narrative theology, Prof. Lu vano uses the killing of over 500 women since 1993 in Ciudad Ju rez as a lens to examine and attempt to understand the role that suffering plays in God's love and relationship with humankind. The first three chapters that form Part I describe events in northern Mexico that provide the context for the killing of young women. The five chapters in the second part examine different themes within the broad context of theodicy the nature of God, the traditional teaching of the church, and contemporary theological approaches to human suffering (e.g., Soelle, Wiesel, Moltman).

Scholarly writing on the music of Arvo Pärt is situated primarily in the fields of musicology, cultural and media studies, and, more recently, in terms of theology/spirituality. Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred focuses on the representational dimensions of Pärt’s music (including the trope of silence), writing and listening past the fact that its storied effects and affects are carried first and foremost as vibrations through air, impressing themselves on the human body. In response, this ambitiously interdisciplinary volume asks: What of sound and materiality as embodiments of the sacred, as historically specific artifacts, and as elements of creation deeply linked to the human sensorium in Pärt studies? In taking up these questions, the book “de-Platonizes” Pärt studies by demystifying the notion of a single “Pärt sound.” It offers innovative, critical analyses of the historical contexts of Pärt’s experimentation, medievalism, and diverse creative work; it re-sounds the acoustic, theological, and representational grounds of silence in Pärt’s music; it listens with critical openness to the intersections of theology, sacred texts, and spirituality in Pärt’s music; and it positions sensing, performing bodies at the center of musical experience. Building on the conventional score-, biography-, and media-based approaches, this volume reframes Pärt studies around the materiality of sound, its sacredness, and its embodied resonances within secular spaces.

This book examines American literary texts whose portrayal of "American" identity involves the incorporation of a "foreign body" as the precondition for a comprehensive understanding of itself. This nexus of disconcerting textual dynamics arises precisely insofar as both citizen/subject and national identity depend upon a certain alterity, an "other" which constitutes the secondary term of a binary structure. "American" identity thus finds itself ironically con-fused and interwoven with another culture or another nation, double-crossed in the enactment of itself. Individual chapters are devoted to Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain.