Different Places Different Voices

Different Places, Different Voices challenges Western feminist and post-colonial approaches in its analysis of the changing lives of women of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania. Recognising the significance of place, this is a book informed by the voices of female geographers from the developing world. Twenty case studies present regional perspectives on urban and rural development, household reproduction and production and community organisation. The theoretical and contextual approach and the emphasis on location and positionality highlight the differences created by place to suggest other ways of seeing.

Different Places, Different Voices challenges Western feminist and post-colonial approaches in its analysis of the changing lives of women of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania. Recognising the significance of place, this is a book informed by the voices of female geographers from the developing world. Twenty case studies present regional perspectives on urban and rural development, household reproduction and production and community organisation. The theoretical and contextual approach and the emphasis on location and positionality highlight the differences created by place to suggest other ways of seeing.

Other Voices, Other Places is a novel about an evangelistic witness by thousands of born-again redeemed spirits in Heaven, made ready for spiritual service to a failing humanity on Earth. These spiritual workers have received the most complete, personal, and experiential knowledge from teachings by Old and New Testament characters, writers, and prophets. Challenges, though, exist. A world awaits, full of doubt, suspicion, and ridicule. Evil is also actively involved with its own commentaries and plans. The voice of Sybil Davies, a storyteller from Heaven, calls out to humanity on Earth to keep hope, faith, and trust alive. She is reporting on the eventual full victory of “good” over “evil” and the awarding of eternal life.

Truman Capote’s first novel is a story of almost supernatural intensity and inventiveness, an audacious foray into the mind of a sensitive boy as he seeks out the grown-up enigmas of love and death in the ghostly landscape of the deep South. “Intense, brilliant . . . . Capote has an astonishing command . . . a magic all his own.” —The Atlantic At the age of twelve, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully’s Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face—and heart—of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.

A man with schizophrenia believes that God is instructing him through the public address system in a bus station. A nun falls into a decades-long depression because she believes that God refuses to answer her prayers. A neighborhood parishioner is bedeviled with anxiety because he believes that a certain religious ritual must be repeated, repeated, and repeated lest God punish him. To what extent are such manifestations of religious thinking analogous to mental disorder? Does mental dysfunction bring an individual closer to religious experience or thought? Hearing Voices and Other Unusual Experiences explores these questions using the tools of the cognitive science of religion and the philosophy of psychopathology. Robert McCauley and George Graham emphasize underlying cognitive continuities between familiar features of religiosity, of mental disorders, and of everyday thinking and action. They contend that much religious thought and behavior can be explained as the cultural activation of our natural cognitive systems, which address matters that are essential to human survival: hazard precautions, agency detection, language processing, and theory of mind. Those systems produce responses to cultural stimuli that may mimic features of cognition and conduct associated with mental disorders, but which are sometimes coded as "religious" depending on the context. The authors examine hallucinations of the voice of God and of other supernatural agents, spiritual depression often described as a "dark night of the soul," religious scrupulosity and compulsiveness, and challenges to theistic cognition that Autistic Spectrum Disorder poses. Their approach promises to shed light on both mental abnormalities and religiosity.

This book focuses on women and translation in cultures 'across other horizons' well beyond the European or Anglo-American centres. Drawing on transnational feminist connections, its editors have assembled work from four continents and included articles from Morocco, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Turkey, China, Saudi Arabia, Columbia and beyond. Thirteen different chapters explore questions around women's roles in translation: as authors, or translators, or theoreticians. In doing so, they open new territories for studies in the area of 'gender and translation' and stimulate academic work on questions in this field around the world. The articles examine the impact of 'Western' feminism when translated to other cultures; they describe translation projects devised to import and make meaningful feminist texts from other places; they engage with the politics of publishing translations by women authors in other cultures, and the role of women translators play in developing new ideas. The diverse approaches to questions around women and translation developed in this collection speak to the volume of unexplored material that has yet to be addressed in this field.

Linking actual instances of language use with structures of social power in francophone Belgium, Gross outlines the history and contemporary configuration of rod puppetry in Liège. The analysis of this working class performance art moves between what occurs on and off stage. As puppeteers speak in other voices, sometimes in Walloon and sometimes in French, they create a sociolinguistic model based on 19th century renditions of medieval texts, the voices of past puppeteers, and the language that surrounds them. The high level of linguistic reflexivity created by the regional language movement has led to frequent metalinguistic and metapragmatic commentaries within the puppet shows. This complex speech genre embedded in social context shows the influence of identity struggles: from local class oppositions to imperial designs abroad. Keeping a tight focus on language, Speaking in Other Voices examines the process of entextualization and recontextualization as stories of war and religion are transmitted to succeeding generations.

In this study, Bartlett presents a theoretical and descriptive development in the discipline of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) extending the recent trend away from critiques of hegemonic practices and towards the description of alternative and minority practices that has been labelled Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA). Through an in-depth case study of intercultural development discourse, the book goes beyond the top-down model of power in CDA and the oppositional approach of PDA to develop a model of power in language as multifaceted and potentially collaborative. This model is used to analyse the particular circumstances of the case study, but is primarily presented as a framework for practical applied linguistic contributions within a wide range of sociocultural contexts. Drawing on social and linguistic theory and methods from a range of functional and applied approaches to language, the book explores the connections between language form and social function, the contextual constraints on discursive action and the potential for the renegotiation of existing discourses and social practices.