Conceptions

In the Age of Revolution, how did American women conceive their lives and marital obligations? By examining the attitudes and behaviors surrounding the contentious issues of family, contraception, abortion, sexuality, beauty, and identity, Susan E. Klepp demonstrates that many women--rural and urban, free and enslaved--began to radically redefine motherhood. They asserted, or attempted to assert, control over their bodies, their marriages, and their daughters' opportunities. Late-eighteenth-century American women were among the first in the world to disavow the continual childbearing and large families that had long been considered ideal. Liberty, equality, and heartfelt religion led to new conceptions of virtuous, rational womanhood and responsible parenthood. These changes can be seen in falling birthrates, in advice to friends and kin, in portraits, and in a gradual, even reluctant, shift in men's opinions. Revolutionary-era women redefined femininity, fertility, family, and their futures by limiting births. Women might not have won the vote in the new Republic, they might not have gained formal rights in other spheres, but, Klepp argues, there was a women's revolution nonetheless.

Infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in India lie at the confluence of multiple cultural conceptions. These ‘conceptions’ are key to understanding the burgeoning spread of assisted reproductive technologies and the social implications of infertility and childlessness in India. This longitudinal study is situated in a number of diverse locales which, when taken together, unravel the complex nature of infertility and assisted conception in contemporary India.

This book explores motherhood in Greek and Roman literature, focusing on images of mothers and their relationships with their children across a variety of genres.

Addressing the often fraught and truncated nature of educating new writing instructors, Conceptions of Literacy proposes a theoretical framework for examining new graduate student instructors’ preexisting attitudes and beliefs about literacy. Based on an empirical study author Meaghan Brewer conducted with graduate students teaching first-year composition for the first time, Conceptions of Literacy draws on narratives, interviews, and classroom observations to describe the conceptions of literacy they have already unknowingly established and how these conceptions impact the way they teach in their own classrooms. Brewer argues that conceptions of literacy undergird the work of writing instructors and that many of the anxieties around composition studies’ disciplinary status are related to the differences perceived between the field’s conceptions of literacy and those of the graduate instructors and adjuncts who teach the majority of composition courses. Conceptions of Literacy makes practical recommendations for how new graduate instructors can begin to perceive and interrogate their conceptions of literacy, which, while influential, are often too personal to recognize.

Immaculate Conceptions investigates the religious imagination - sacred truth communicated through contingent and contextually determined theological propositions - as deployed in early modern Spanish textual and visual representations of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception.

Bringing together authors from academia and practice, this book examines spatial planning at different places throughout the British Isles. Six illustrative case studies of practice examine which conceptions of space and place have been articulated, presented and visualized through the production of spatial strategies. Ranging from a large conurbation (London) to regional (Yorkshire and Humber) and national levels, the case studies give a rounded and grounded view of the physical results and the theory behind them. While there is widespread support for re-orienting planning towards space and place, there has been little common understanding about what constitutes ‘spatial planning’, and what conceptions of space and place underpin it. This book addresses these questions and stimulates debate and critical thinking about space and place among academic and professional planners.

The idea of civil society has long been central to the Western liberal-democratic tradition, where it has been seen as a crucial site for the development and pursuit of basic liberal values such as individual freedom, social pluralism, and democratic citizenship. This book considers how a host of other ethical traditions define civil society. Unlike most studies of the subject, which focus on a particular region or tradition, it considers a range of ethical traditions rarely addressed in one volume: libertarianism, critical theory, feminism, liberal egalitarianism, natural law, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Confucianism. It considers the extent to which these traditions agree or disagree on how to define civil society's limits and how to evaluate its benefits and harms. A variety of distinguished advocates and interpreters of these traditions present in-depth explorations of how these various traditions think of ethical pluralism within societies, asking how a society should respond to diversity among its members. Together they produce a work rich with original insights on a wide range of subjects about which little has been written to date. An excellent starting point for a comparative ethics of civil society, this book concludes that while the concept of civil society originated in the liberal tradition, it is quickly becoming an important focus for a truly cross-cultural dialogue. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Michael Banner, Hasan Hanafi, Loren E. Lomasky, Richard Madsen, Michael A. Mosher, Michael Pakaluk, Anne Philips, Adam B. Seligman, Suzanne Last Stone, and Michael Walzer.

This outstanding memorial volume records and reassesses the contributions of Merton M. Gill (1914-1994), a principal architect of psychoanalytic theory and a principled exemplar of the modern psychoanalytic sensibility throughout the second half of the 20th century. Critical evaluations of Gill's place in psychoanalysis and a series of personal and professional reminiscences are joined to substantive reengagement of central controversies in which Gill played a key part. These controversies revolve around the "natural science" versus "hermeneutic" orientation in psychoanalysis (Holt, Eagle, Friedman); the status of psychoanalysis as a one-person and/or two-person psychology (Jacobs, Silverman); pyschoanalysis versus psychotherapy (Wallerstein, Migone, Gedo); and the meaning and use of transference (Kernberg, Wolitzky, Cooper).