As a fictional memoir, Zahn Pesh tells the true story of a mentally disabled young man Billy, known affectionately as Vaney and Billys run-in with the San Francisco police. Often using Billy speak, the youths arcane lingo, the author reveals societys neglect and injustices toward such individuals. Wrongly, Billy is accused of making terrorist threats against a paramedic, but few other than Pesh believe the disabled kids story. Avoiding the blame game, Pesh shows how each from personal perspective does his duty, indiscriminately, but nonetheless Billy, or Vaney, suffers because the system fails. Billy is treated like a criminal, not as a patient, which Pesh insists he is. Try as he might, Pesh only meagerly reforms that system, before . . .

The breakdown of traditional African values and the consequences of disconnection from African ancestral beliefs are examined in this attempt to understand the vicious cycle of community violence.

In Global Visions of Violence, the editors and contributors argue that violence creates a lens, bridge, and method for interdisciplinary collaboration that examines Christianity worldwide in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By analyzing the myriad ways violence, persecution, and suffering impact Christians and the imagination of Christian identity globally, this interdisciplinary volume integrates the perspectives of ethicists, historians, anthropologists, and ethnographers to generate new conversations. Taken together, the chapters in this book challenge scholarship on Christian growth that has not accounted for violence while analyzing persecution narratives that can wield data toward partisan ends. This allows Global Visions of Violence to push urgent conversations forward, giving voice to projects that illuminate wide and often hidden landscapes that have been shaped by global visions of violence, and seeking solutions that end violence and turn toward the pursuit of justice, peace, and human rights among suffering Christians.

In this book, Vincenzo Ruggiero offers a typology of different forms of political violence. From systemic and institutional violence, to the behaviour of crowds, to armed conflict and terrorism, Ruggiero draws on a range of perspectives from criminology, social theory, political science, critical legal studies and literary criticism to consider how these forms of violence are linked in an interdependent field of forces. Ruggiero argues that systemic violence encourages more institutional violence, which in turn weakens the ability of citizens to set up political agendas for change. He advocates for a reduction of all types of violence, which can be enacted through fairer distribution of resources and the provision of political space for contention and negotiation. This book will be of interest to all those engaged in research on violence, terrorism, armed conflict and the crimes of the powerful. It makes an important contribution to criminological and social theory.

This book examines how the experiences of hearing voices and seeing visions were understood within the cultural, literary, and intellectual contexts of the medieval and early modern periods. In the Middle Ages, these experiences were interpreted according to frameworks that could credit visionaries or voice-hearers with spiritual knowledge, and allow them to inhabit social roles that were as much desired as feared. Voice-hearing and visionary experience offered powerful creative possibilities in imaginative literature and were often central to the writing of inner, spiritual lives. Ideas about such experience were taken up and reshaped in response to the cultural shifts of the early modern period. These essays, which consider the period 1100 to 1700, offer diverse new insights into a complex, controversial, and contested category of human experience, exploring literary and spiritual works as illuminated by scientific and medical writings, natural philosophy and theology, and the visual arts. In extending and challenging contemporary bio-medical perspectives through the insights and methodologies of the arts and humanities, the volume offers a timely intervention within the wider project of the medical humanities. Chapters 2 and 5 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Harmonizing Latina Visions and Voices: Cultural Explorations ofEntornos discursively challenges the erasures, stigma, and silences imposed on women by functioning as a harmonizing choir, a collection of voices to testify on mujerismo, its vision, and its promise for (our) future. This collection puts “on the record” a pathway toward liberation that pushes back against white supremacist projects unleashed by academia, our families, official narratives of the State, and immigration. This book does not seek to equate the experiences of all Latinas or envision a one-size-fits-all response. We harmonize these diverse voices, understanding that these stories, poems, and essays are invoking different spaces, times, and experiences. We offer them as an intergenerational, intellectual, and spiritual dialogue. As a practice, this work centers and contextualizes how women’s resistance is articulated and expressed. The stories reflected in the chapters that follow are often matricentric, transnational, and queer. Some recurring themes center on the policing, policies, and legislations that govern Latina’s bodies and the entornos (social/environmental worlds) in which they move, are detained, or embodied.

The essays in Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision spring from an International Summer Institute held in 1996 on the cultural restoration of oppressed Indigenous peoples. The contributors, primarily Indigenous, unravel the processes of colonization that enfolded modern society and resulted in the oppression of Indigenous peoples.