Margins Of Reality

WHAT HAS MODERN SCIENCE SWEPT UNDER THE RUG? This pioneering work, which sparked intense controversy when it was first published two decades ago, suggests that modern science, in the name of rigor and objectivity, has arbitrarily excluded the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality. Drawing on the results of their first decade of empirical experimentation and theoretical modeling in their Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program, the authors reach provocative conclusions about the interaction of human consciousness with physical devices, information-gathering processes, and technological systems. The scientific, personal, and social implications of this revolutionary work are staggering. MARGINS OF REALITY is nothing less than a fundamental reevaluation of how the world really works.

In using case studies such as Touching the Void (2003) and the films of Nick Broomfield, this timely introduction to the growing field of documentary explores the definition and understanding of the form, as well as the relationship between documentary and drama, specifically the notion of reconstruction and reenactment. Paul Ward also discusses animated documentaries, the fertile genre of comedy, and feature-length contemporary works that have achieved widespread cinematic release.

‘Psychologists have mapped out developmental stages for the first fifteen to twenty years; but thereafter life is a blank. Half a century of adult life remains, psychologically speaking, an unchartered waste.’ Frank Musgrove focuses on the question ‘Can adults change?’ and challenges the still widely-held view that adult life is static. Originally published in 1977, the author examines change principally in terms of a modification of consciousness through the experience of marginality. With the help of interviews, he discusses seven groups in contemporary Britain at the time, found in the ‘margins’ of society. Three of the selected groups are involuntary and stigmatized: men and women who have gone blind as adults; handicapped people in a home for the incurably disabled; and homosexuals. The other four groups enjoy high-status and voluntary marginality: late-entrants to the Anglican ministry; self-employed artists; a Sufi commune of Islamic mystics; and a Hare Krishna commune. Frank Musgrove’s lively study of adult resocialization will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists and anyone concerned with the general problem of adjustment to rapid social change. It also relates marginality to the issue of life-long learning and points to some of the creative possibilities of the marginal situation.

Artist Charley Keo's new gig begins as a fun challenge to breathe new life into the forgotten pulp world of Elad - this time as a comic book. But as tendrils of this lost realm creep into her sleepy Portland neighborhood, Charley realizes that Elad is much more than the lines on a day-dreamt map, more than the sum of an old hack's prose. Elad has its hooks in Charley, and what was once fantasy has become deadly reality for both the artist and the woman she loves.

This book explores how Indigenous Peoples are impacted by globalization and the cult of the individual that often accompanies the phenomenon.

The debate on modernity and postmodernity has awakened interest in the importance of the spatial for cultural formations. But what of those spaces that exist as much in the imagination as in physical reality? This book attempts to develop an alternative geography and sociology of space by examining `places on the margin'.