Juggling Bullies

BASED ON A TRUE STORY “AFTER ALL THE TEACHERS LEAVE THE ROOM, YOU CAN COME TO THE MICROPHONE AND SAY ANYTHING YOU WANT...TO ANYONE.” WOULD YOU DO IT? Tyler Richardson has struggled his entire life to stand up to one bully and has never wanted anything more than to say how he feels. When the senior class is given 3 hours for their Open Mic event, will it be enough time to find the courage to approach the stage and clear the air for all to hear?

In this examination of the ubiquitous practice of bullying among youth, compelling first person stories vividly convey the lived experience of peer torment and how it impacted the lives of five diverse young women. Author Keith Berry’s own autoethnographic narratives and analysis add important relational communication, methodological, and ethical dimensions to their accounts. The personal stories create an opening to understand how this form of physical and verbal violence shapes identities, relationships, communication, and the construction of meaning among a variety of youth. The layered narrative describes the practices constituting bullying and how youth work to cope with peer torment and its aftermath, largely focusing on identity construction and well being; addresses contemporary cyberbullying as well as other forms of relational aggression in many social contexts across race, gender, and sexual orientations; is written in a compelling way to be accessible to students in communication, education, psychology, social welfare, and other fields.

Zach and Zoe start up 'Odd Jobs Unlimited' as a way to beat the summer doldrums, but just when their business begins to take off with a dogsitting job, bullying cousin Howie comes to stay. Juggling the needs of the pup and the demands of their cousin is difficult enough, but when household items start disappearing, the twins set out to solve the mystery. [Fry Reading Level - 3.5]

Unscrupulous, devilishly ambitious and undeniably charismatic, Domenico Barbaja was the most celebrated Italian impresario of the early 1800s and one of the most intriguing characters to dominate the operatic empire of the period. Dubbed the "Viceroy of Naples", Barbaja managed both the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples and La Scala in Milan. He was the influential force behind the careers of a plethora of artists including Vincenzo Bellini, Gioachino Rossini and the great mezzo-soprano Isabella Colbran, who became Barbaja's lover before eventually deserting him to marry Rossini. Most vitally, Barbaja's vision had an irrevocable impact on the history of Italian opera; determined to create a lucrative business, he cultivated an energetic environment of new artists producing innovative, exciting opera that people would flock to hear. Philip Eisenbeiss brilliantly pieces together the forgotten story of a tireless tyrant who began life as a barely educated coffee waiter, yet grew to be one of the richest and most potent men in Italy. A natural entrepreneur, Barbaja had the ability to predict a sensation; a skill he exploited his entire life, forging his fortune as a café-owner, arms profiteer, gambling tycoon and eventually, opera magnate. Eisenbeiss unlocks the enigma of this eccentric and fascinating personality that has been hitherto neglected.

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2014. How and why does miscommunication lead to conflict and the abuse of power? What is bullying and in what sense is it an abuse of power? Drawing on the expertise of twenty-five researchers from academia, public and private spheres, this work discusses these and a wide range of other questions relating to communication, conflict, bullying and the abuse of power. Although ideally in a perfect world these questions would not even arise, even if this should be Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds,” it is still an imperfect world and so, these questions arise and are in want of exploration. The chapters comprising this work contain the fruit of multi and inter-disciplinary discussions that occurred in an atmosphere of mutual respect and cooperation with the common goal of better understanding and advancing knowledge on these issues.

This is a book for those who have a stake in and curiosity about the relationship between autism and the stage. Performance here covers theatre to therapy, film to biography, art and beyond. If you are a theater or film critic, a speech or drama therapist, a higher education specialist or special education instructor, a parent of a child on the autism spectrum or an individual with ASD interested in theatre, this book may hold unique value for you. This work is meant to cover a range of issues and reach out to audiences, critics, professionals and parents who want to know more about performance representations of autism. One message reverberates throughout the book: each autistic person illustrates different approaches to and perspectives on life. We become richer each time we come to understand these new perspectives and performance powerfully enhances our understanding of them. Autism Spectrum Disorders include alternative modes of processing information, recording images, discoursing with others, and interpreting social scenes. In this conversation, performance can function as an analytical lens, a representational space, a means of perceptual innovation, and a therapeutic tool. The definition of autism as a disorder has evolved from its first diagnosis in the 1940s to our current frame of reference with several key revisions. These three categories—interaction, communication, and perseveration—underlie any published study of those on the autism spectrum. What has shifted in recent years is an approach to disability that positions autism as a social construction rather than a medical problem.