This book is a search for the promises of public education and the places where these are broken by critics feeding at the academic and professional trough. This book is a venture in critical auto-ethnography. Exploring critique through this ethnographic technique has allowed me to bring stories to the reader that work to illuminate the personal nature of educational ethics. It works to fill the gap in education critique where self-examination is missing. It is a cultural study of five different educational environments. Research in cultural studies attempts to account for cultural objects under conditions constrained by power and defined by contestation, conflict, and change. Cultural Studies grapples with the volatility of cultural happenings. Throwing Voices emphasizes self-reflexivity, an awareness that scholars and their scholarship are themselves caught up in the social currents and in the global circulation of meanings being studied. In taking up questions from this perspective, cultural studies both draws on and develops key strands of contemporary cultural theory: semiotics, deconstruction and poststructuralism, dialogics, subaltern and postcolonial studies. The field also draws on and develops a number of innovative methodologies: autoethnography, blurred genres of writing, and other new forms of critical research. I pay homage to satirist Lenny Bruce, and it has earned me a one-way ticket to scholarly palookaville. I had actually, not virtually transgressed, in a conference forum where virtual radicalism routinely trumps reality. I sold cars and write about the intersection of values in education and this pinnacle of American commerce. Here is also a chronicle of time spent as evaluator in a small Native American school, with an effort to draw attention to the world of socialclass, yet catalogue my own complicity in the evaluation game. And here I present my decisions as a state education department bureaucrat, set against the moral universe of the Chicago poetry slam. Finally, this is work to find the truth in a critical race theory, and hopes for solidarity in art, in jazz, and in the world of New Orleans music. I attempt to follow the breadcrumbs back through a career to find the source of compassion for working people and their children, and potential solidarity through a clearer more honest language than the language of higher education and administration.

Examines the Torres Strait islanders' struggle for self-determination, and to recover their rights to their land, sea, and fish resources.

Sanji Carter is a talented, beautiful, free spirited freelance photographer from New York City, who will stop at nothing to prove her devotion to the man in her life. When her boyfriend of several years (Memphis) is given a promotion that lands him his dream job, she goes out on a limb and follows him to London in hopes of finally getting the life that she desires. When her expectations are not met, she looks to a new friend (Yohan) for fulfillment. Although they start out as curious strangers merely in search of companionship, their connection soon blossoms into romance. Before long, she finds herself trapped in a love triangle. Left with the task of choosing between her love for one man and her obligation to the other. With the help of her closest friend, she quickly arrives at her decision. When her choice comes back to haunt her, she tries to escape by returning to the place where it all began. She has no idea that it will all end in murder.

For nearly five decades, Colombia has been embroiled in internal armed conflict among guerrilla groups, paramilitary militias, and the country’s own military. Civilians in Colombia have to make their lives despite the threat of torture, kidnapping, and large-scale massacres—and more than four million have had to flee their homes. The oral histories in Throwing Stones at the Moon describe the most widespread of Colombia’s human rights crises: forced displacement. Speakers recount life before displacement, the reasons for their flight, and their struggle to rebuild their lives. Among the narrators: JULIA, a hospital union leader whose fight against corruption led to a brutal attempt on her life. In 2009, assassins tracked her to her home and stabbed her seven times in the face and chest. Since the attack, Julia has undergone eight facial reconstructive surgeries, and continues to live in hiding. DANNY, who at eighteen joined a right-wing paramilitary’s enormous training camp in the Eastern Plains of Colombia. Initially lured by the promise of quick money, Danny soon realized his mistake and escaped to Ecuador. He describes his harrowing escape and his struggle to survive as a refugee with two young children to support.

The exquisite new collection by the award-winning poet Mary Jo Bang, author of The Last Two Seconds and Elegy We were ridiculous—me, with my high jinks and hat. Him, with his boredom and drink. I look back now and see buildings so thick that the life I thought I was making then is nothing but interlocking angles and above them, that blot of gray sky I sometimes saw. Underneath is the edge of what wasn’t known then. When I would go. When I would come back. What I would be when. —from “One Glass Negative” A Doll for Throwing takes its title from the Bauhaus artist Alma Siedhoff-Buscher’s Wurfpuppe, a flexible and durable woven doll that, if thrown, would land with grace. A ventriloquist is also said to “throw” her voice into a doll that rests on the knee. Mary Jo Bang’s prose poems in this fascinating book create a speaker who had been a part of the Bauhaus school in Germany a century ago and who had also seen the school’s collapse when it was shut by the Nazis in 1933. Since this speaker is not a person but only a construct, she is also equally alive in the present and gives voice to the conditions of both time periods: nostalgia, xenophobia, and political extremism. The life of the Bauhaus photographer Lucia Moholy echoes across these poems—the end of her marriage, the loss of her negatives, and her effort to continue to make work and be known for having made it.

The former NFL quarterback examines the roots of masculinity gone awry and how it promotes violence against women. In You Throw Like a Girl, former Syracuse University quarterback and NFL veteran Don McPherson examines how the narrow definition of masculinity adversely impacts women and creates many “blind spots” that hinder the healthy development of men. Dissecting the strict set of beliefs and behaviors that underpin our understanding of masculinity, he contends that we don’t raise boys to be men, we raise them not to be women. Using examples from his own life, including his storied football career, McPherson passionately argues that viewing violence against women as a “women’s issue” not just ignores men’s culpability but conflates the toxicity of men’s violence with being male. In You Throw Like a Girl, McPherson leads us beyond the blind spots and toward solutions, analyzing how we can engage men in a sustained dialogue, with a new set of terms that are aspirational and more accurately representative of the emotional wholeness of men. “One of the most important books ever written by a former elite male athlete.” —Jackson Katz, author of The Macho Paradox “An essential exploration of what’s holding men and sports back—and how to overcome it.” —The Washington Post “Don McPherson is a quarterback for a wider community.” —Newsday “A crucial read for anyone interested in learning more about how sports culture informs limited definitions of masculinity, and how such definitions are destructive for boys and men, and dangerous to girls and women.” —The Undefeated (A Can’t Miss Book of 2019)