Blurring Boundaries

Contemporary discussions on nonfiction are often riddled with questions about the boundaries between truth and memory, honesty and artifice, facts and lies. Just how much truth is in nonfiction? How much is a lie? Blurring the Boundaries sets out to answer such questions while simultaneously exploring the limits of the form. This collection features twenty genre-bending essays from today's most renowned teachers and writers--including original work from Michael Martone, Marcia Aldrich, Dinty W. Moore, Lia Purpura, and Robin Hemley, among others. These essays experiment with structure, style, and subject matter, and each is accompanied by the writer's personal reflection on the work itself, illuminating his or her struggles along the way. As these innovative writers stretch the limits of genre, they take us with them, offering readers a front-row seat to an ever-evolving form. Readers also receive a practical approach to craft thanks to the unique writing exercises provided by the writers themselves. Part groundbreaking nonfiction collection, part writing reference, Blurring the Boundaries serves as the ideal book for literary lovers and practitioners of the craft.

Over the decades, the lines separating young- middle-aged-, and older adults have blurred, as indicated by a broadening of the appropriate years for making life decisions. Not only are many people marrying later, but some are marrying earlier than ever. Overall, women giving birth later, but some are having children earlier in their lives. Older people are retiring later, but some are retiring at a younger age. The spread or variability (standard deviation) of age-based decisions has increased substantially, giving adults greater freedom from the traditional constraints of age. With these relaxed age norms has come a host of related social problems. The relaxation of age norms for adult decision-making has inadvertently blurred the boundaries between adults and teenagers, between teenagers and children. This generalization of the phenomenon throughout the life cycle is responsible for the adultification of childhood. Eight year old girls are, to an increasing extent, being treated as sexual objects; bullying peaks in the 6th grade; larger numbers of girls are having oral sex or sexual intercourse by the age of 15; the pregnancy rate for girls 13-15 is on the rise; we are in the process of dismantling the juvenile justice system in favor of adult forms of punishment; and more and more children are left without adult supervision in the afternoons, as though they were miniature adults who are capable of raising themselves. Jack Levin is the American Sociological Association’s 2009 Winner of the “Public Understanding of Sociology” Award. This short book communicates the power and importance of sociological thinking to major, worldwide social trends. Ideal for use in undergraduate courses such as introductory sociology, social problems, and social change as well as more advanced courses in population, or sociology of aging.

This book is about the fundamental meaning of my practice: the impossibility of defining boundaries in contemporary times in terms of language as idiom or artistic media, or in terms of nationality or identity, which remain especially relevant issues for those who migrate for family, work, religious, ethnic or political reasons. My work deals with the construction of heteroclite figures, residues of diverse personal experiences, represented on one hand by appropriation - which I do not treat as a conceptual practice, but instead as a sort of safe way to work between the diverse environments in which I am a foreigner - and, on the other hand, by a syncretic coexistence of diverse lines of thought and practices with which I build my identity and culture.

Blurred Boundaries explores decisive moments when the traditional boundaries of fiction/nonfiction, truth and falsehood blur. Nichols argues that a history of social representation in film, television and video requires an understanding of the fate of both contemporary and older work. Traditionally, film history and cultural studies sought to place films in a historical context. Nichols proposes a new goal: to examine how specific works, old and new, promote or suppress a sense of historical consciousness. Examining work from Eisenstein's Strike to the Rodney King videotape, Nichols interrelates issues of formal structure, viewer response and historical consciousness. Simultaneously, Blurred Boundaries radically alters the interpretive frameworks offered by neo-formalism and psychoanalysis: Comprehension itself becomes a social act of transformative understanding rather than an abstract mental process while the use of psychoanalytic terms like desire, lack, or paranoia to make social points metaphorically yields to a vocabulary designed expressly for historical interpretation such as project, intentionality and the social imaginary. An important departure from prevailing trends in many fields, Blurred Boundaries offers new directions for the study of visual culture.

In Blurring Boundaries scholars from law and social sciences offer a critical account of the main topics of forced migration and advance a much-needed fresh view on forced migration through the lens of human security.

In politischen Auseinandersetzungen wird “Gender” als Sammelbegriff für Themen wie Frauen- und LGBTIQ + -Rechte, Gleichstellung der Geschlechter, sexuelle Bildung, feministisches Wissen und Geschlechterforschung verwendet. Während sich bisherige Veröffentlichungen auf die anti-gender Gruppen selbst oder feministische und queere Reaktionen auf diese konzentrieren, beleuchtet dieser Band die verschwimmenden Grenzen zwischen beiden Lagern. Im Fokus steht die Frage, inwieweit “Anti-Gender”-Behauptungen mit bestimmten Spielarten in der feministischen und LGBTIQ+-Politik interagieren und so Diskursbrücken zu liberalen und progressiven Teilen der Gesellschaft bauen. Anders als der „Sammelbegriff“ Gender vermuten lässt, ist das feministische und LGBTIQ+-Lager von politischen Konflikten, Meinungsverschiedenheiten und divergierenden Interessen durchzogen. Daher analysieren die Autor*innen die Verbindungen zwischen einigen dieser umstrittenen Positionen und dem “Anti-Gender”-Diskurs.

Examines the overlap and blurring of boundaries among humans, animals, and machines.