Can an individual act of suicide be socially significant, or does it present too many imponderable features? This book examines suicide like no other. Unconcerned with the individual dispositions that lead a person to commit such an act, Usurping Suicide focuses on the reception suicides have produced – their political, social and cultural implications. How does a particular act of suicide enable a collective significance to be attached to it? And what contextual circumstances predispose a politicised public response? From Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation during regime change in Tunisia to Dimitris Christoulas’s public shooting at a time of increased political upheaval in Greece, and beyond – this remarkable work examines how the individuality of the act of suicide poses a disturbing symbolic conundrum for the dominant liberal order.

Throughout the French empire, from the Atlantic and the Caribbean to West and North Africa, men, women, and children responded to enslavement, colonization, and oppression through acts of suicide. In The Suicide Archive, Doyle D. Calhoun charts a long history of suicidal resistance to French colonialism and neocolonialism, from the time of slavery to the Algerian War for Independence to the “Arab Spring.” Noting that suicide was either obscured in or occluded from French colonial archives, Calhoun turns to literature and film to show how aesthetic forms and narrative accounts can keep alive the silenced histories of suicide as a political language. Drawing on scientific texts, police files, and legal proceedings alongside contemporary African and Afro-Caribbean novels, film, and Senegalese oral history, Calhoun outlines how such aesthetic works rewrite histories of resistance and loss. Consequently, Calhoun offers a new way of writing about suicide, slavery, and coloniality in relation to literary history.

Part of the authoritative Oxford Textbooks in Psychiatry series, the new edition of the Oxford Textbook of Suicidology and Suicide Prevention remains a key text in the field of suicidology, fully updated with new chapters devoted to major psychiatric disorders and their relation to suicide.

In this case study of the Republic of Geneva, Jeffrey R. Watt convincingly argues the early modern era marked decisive change in the history of suicide. His analysis of criminal proceedings and death records shows that magistrates of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries often imposed penalties against the bodies and estates of those who took their lives. According to beliefs shared by theologian John Calvin, magistrates, and common folk, self-murder was caused by demon possession. Similar views and practices were found among both Protestants and Catholics throughout Reformation Europe. By contrast, in the late eighteenth century many philosophies defended the right to take one's life under certain circumstances; Geneva’s magistrates in effect decriminalized suicide; and even commoners blamed suicide on mental illness or personal reversals, not on satanic influences. Watt uses Geneva's uniquely rich and well-organized sources in this first study to provide reliable evidence on suicide rates for premodern Europe. He places his findings within a wide range of historical and sociological scholarship, and while suicide was rare through the seventeenth century, he shows that Geneva experienced an explosion in self-inflicted deaths after 1750. Quite simply, early modern Geneva witnessed nothing less than the birth of modern suicide both in attitudes toward it—thoroughly secularized, medicalized, and stripped of diabolical undertones—and the frequency of it.

A wake-up call to Americans who have long been deluded by the dangerous twenty-first hucksters of longevity. “If old age isn’t for sissies, neither is Susan Jacoby’s tough-minded and important book ... which demolishes popular myths that we can ‘cure’ the ‘disease’ of aging.”—The Washington Post Combining historical, social, and economic analysis with personal experiences of love and loss, Jacoby reveals the hazards of the magical thinking that prevents us from facing the genuine battles of growing old. Never Say Die speaks to Americans, whatever their age, who draw courage and hope from facing reality instead of embracing platitudes and delusions, and who want to grow old with dignity and purpose. It is a life-affirming and powerful message that has never been more relevant.

Award-winning professor and author Matthew Lippman enhances teaching and learning with his newest text, Striking the Balance: Debating Criminal Justice and Law. Organizing the book around clashing points of view on contemporary issues in criminal justice and criminal law, Lippman puts each debate into context for students to help them develop a better understanding of the issue. Designed to develop the reader’s critical thinking skills, the text offers students summaries of contrasting views from original sources, questions for classroom discussion, and engaging “You Decide” activities. Additionally, chapter topics are independent of one another, giving instructors the flexibility to customize the material to their individual course organization. Edited to minimize technical legal terms, the text is the perfect companion to any criminal law or introductory criminal justice textbook.

'A light-hearted, but engaging conversation about one of the key technologies of our age.I recommend this book to anyone interested in the broader issues around Artificial Intelligence.'Richard HartleyAustralian National University, Australia This book engages with the title question: what is artificial intelligence (AI)? Instead of reiterating received definitions or surveying the field from a disciplinary perspective, the question is engaged here by putting two standpoints into conversation. The standpoints are different in their disciplinary groundings — i.e. technology and the humanities — and also in their approaches — i.e. applied and conceptual. Peter is an AI engineer: his approach is in terms of how to make AI work. Suman is a humanities researcher: his approach is in terms of what people and academics mean when they say 'AI'.A coherent argument, if not a consensus, develops by putting the two standpoints into conversation. The conversation is presented in 32 short chapters, in turn by Suman and Peter. There are two parts: Part 1, Questioning AI, and Part 2, AI and Government Policy. The first part covers issues such as the meaning of intelligence, automation, evolution, artificial and language. It outlines some of the processes through which these concepts may be technologically grounded as AI. The second part addresses policy considerations that underpin the development of AI and responds to the consequences. Themes taken up here include: rights and responsibilities; data usage and state-level strategies in the USA, UK and China; unemployment and policy futures.