Face it until you make it. Get up. Work Hard. Fail. Do a little bit better. Fail again. Get back up. Repeat.Succeed! Claim what is Yours.#Own it!

Collage illustrations introduce the letters of the alphabet.

Close your eyes and take a Deep Breath. Do you hear that? Do you Feel that? It is what you have left after everything Bad Has Beaten you down and left you Abandoned. It is what you have left after you have been ripped at the Seams, Frayed and Falling Apart. Bleeding on your hands and Knees, Begging to be Noticed or saved subjecting yourself to a cage like a scared Animal. Pulse. The Journey Begins Now. Allow me to Assist you in making sense of it all so you can Reflect, Review, Renew, Revitalize and Rebuild. Make a Commitment. You want to Give Up and Give in ? STOP. I won't Let You. Your Life is As Beautiful as you Make it. It is My Life Mission to Assist and Support Beautifully Broken People into realizing that Being Alive isn't just about a Heart Beat and a Pulse. It is about getting to know yourself, Embracing and Fulfilling your Calling and True Purpose for your Life.

Since Antiquity, the idea of the artist as a magician, trickster and powerful creator of new realities has established itself as a fertile idea in the discussion of image-making. The conjuring of illusions, the inherent link between the material and the spiritual and the wish to make the invisible visible are all part of this wider discourse. Visions of Enchantment looks at the fascinating intersections between esotericism and visual culture through a decidedly cross-cultural lens, with topics ranging from talismanic magic and the Renaissance exploration of alchemy, through to the role of magic in modern art and 20th century experimental film.00The essays offered in 'Visions of Enchantment: Occultism, Magic and Visual Culture' have been selected from papers presented at a major international conference at the University of Cambridge in 2014. It includes work by some of the leading scholars in Western Esotericism including Antoine Faivre, M.E. Warlick and Deanna Petherbridge. It attests to the vibrant role that magic and the occult play in cutting-edge research across a wide variety of the arts and humanities today.

'Disenchantment' has been a consistent trope in sociology since Weber's appropriation of the term nearly a century ago. In this work I argue that, in contrast to the standard modernization story, organizations have long been subject to countervailing forces other than that that of rationalization. This has been especially true in schools, institutions that exist at the intersection of the logics of bureaucracy, democracy and expressive youth cultures. In this dissertation I identify a uniquely contemporary organizational response to these tensions, one I associate with the notion of 're-enchantment.' I use this term to refer to reforms that identify emotional and intellectual alienation as the primary institutional problems to be overcome and find a solution in the reinvigoration of organizational practices with imagination, creativity, and collaboration. The result is a genre of reform that accepts the logic of standardized and rationalized outcomes but attempts to transform the process of achieving these goals by 're-enchanting' organizational experience with a sense of connectedness and creativity. In this dissertation I discuss small school reform generally, and a particular instance of it at Mill Town high specifically, as examples of organizational re-enchantment. More than just introducing new practices or structures, small school reform entails an effort to reshape the tactic and practical modes of coordination, what I call ways of being. These are social conventions that allow actors to coordinate with each other and their environment in a way that is grounded in a shared practical understanding of the proper ordering of people and things. In contrast to standard account that locate the barrier to change in the minds of organizational actors, utilizing a mixed-methods approach I show that much of the failure of the reform at Mill Town was not the result of beliefs, attitudes or values of teachers, but rather concerned the complexity of changing culturally disposed, and intersubjectively sustained, modes of coordination in the organization.

This book is a major new contribution to the study of cultural identities in Britain and Ireland from the Reformation to Romanticism. It provides a fresh perspective on the rise of interest in British vernacular (or “folk”) cultures, which has often been elided with the emergence of British Romanticism and its Continental precursors. Here the Romantics’ discovery of and admiration for vernacular traditions is placed in a longer historical timeline reaching back to the controversies sparked by the Protestant Reformation. The book charts the emergence of a nuanced discourse about vernacular cultures, developing in response to the Reformers’ devastating attack on customary practices and beliefs relating to the natural world, seasonal festivities, and rites of passage. It became a discourse grounded in humanist Biblical and antiquarian scholarship; informed by the theological and pastoral problems of the long period of religious instability after the Reformation; and, over the course of the eighteenth century, colored by new ideas about culture drawn from Enlightenment historicism and empiricism. This study shows that Romantic literary primitivism and Romantic social thought, both radical and conservative, grew out of this rich context. It will be welcomed by historians of early modern and eighteenth-century Britain and those interested in the study of religious and vernacular cultures.