Masking Hegemony

'Masking Hegemony' presents a critical evaluation of the language used in liberal political thought, tracing liberalism's use of two key binary concepts - public/private and religion/state - from the Protestant Reformation to the present. Whilst appearing to separate "religion" from "state" and "public" from "private", this language actually masks the influence of religious institutions on state policies and the inevitable circulation of power from the private to the public sphere in a liberal democracy. 'Masking Hegemony' uses the work of Gramsci, Foucault and Bourdieu to offer a fresh approach to liberal ideology that will be of interest to students and scholars of both politics and religion.

​This edited book investigates how life is affected by the increasingly authoritarian regime in Bangladesh.Earlier a flawed but real electoral democracy, over the last several years Bangladesh has been characterised as a ‘hybrid regime’ in The Economist’s Democracy Index. Today it is a country in which law still rules and leaders are still chosen – but only on paper. The uniqueness of this book is not in defining regime type or investigating trajectories. It is in its efforts to study how these changes affect everyday life. All chapters are based on intimate knowledge of a field, on first-hand experience, and on interviews and ethnography. This book will interest political scientists and scholars of Bangladesh, the Islamic world and beyond, with findings of broad relevance to hybrid regimes.

In this book-length study of The Satanic Temple, Joseph Laycock, a scholar of new religious movements, contends that the emergence of "political Satanism" marks a significant moment in American religious history that will have a lasting impact on how Americans frame debates about religious freedom. Though the group gained attention for its strategic deployment of outrage, it claims to have developed beyond politics into a religious movement. Equal parts history and ethnography, Speak of the Devil demonstrates why religious Satanism is significant to larger conversations about the definition of religion, religious freedom, and religious tolerance.

What is a human being? What does it mean to be human? How can you lead your life in ways that best fulfil your own nature? In The Human Paradox, Ralph Heintzman explores these vital questions and offers an exciting new vision of the nature of the human. The Human Paradox aims to counter or correct several contemporary assumptions about the nature of the human, especially the tendency of Western culture, since the seventeenth century, to identify the human with rationality and the rational mind. Using the lens of the virtues, The Human Paradox shows how rediscovering the nature of the human can help not just to understand one’s own paradoxical nature but to act in ways that are more consistent with its full reality. Offering accessible insight from both traditional and contemporary thought, The Human Paradox shows how a fuller, richer vision of the human can help address urgent contemporary problems, including the challenges of cultural and religious diversity, human migration and human rights, the role of the market, artificial intelligence, the future of democracy, and global climate change. This fresh perspective on the Western past will guide readers into what it means to be human and open new possibilities for the future.

Exploring how Margaret Atwood’s fiction reimagines the figure of the detective and the nature of crime, Jackie Shead shows how the author radically reworks the crime fiction genre. Shead focuses on Surfacing, Bodily Harm, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake and selected short fiction, showing the ways in which Atwood’s protagonists are confronted by their own collusion in hegemonic assumptions and thus are motivated to investigate and expose crimes of gender, class and colonialism. Shead begins with a discussion of how Atwood’s treatment of crime fiction’s generic elements, particularly those of the whodunit, clue puzzle and spy thriller, departs from convention. Through discussion of Atwood’s metafictive strategies, Shead also examines Atwood’s techniques for activating her readers as investigators who are offered an educative process parallel to that experienced by some of the author’s protagonists. This book also marks a significant intervention in an ongoing debate among Atwood critics that pits the author’s postmodernism against her ethical and humanistic concerns.

Kevin Denys Bonnycastle’s Stranger Rape is an in-depth study of the lives of fourteen men who raped women unknown to them. Using new data derived from official offender files, offender program observations, and the men’s personal histories, Bonnycastle documents, compares, and contrasts their experiences from boyhood to adulthood and eventual incarceration. Bonnycastle argues that stranger-rapists do not fit existing portrayals of them as predatory monsters or misogynist everymen. Instead, through an innovative approach that builds on research and theory from feminism, gender studies, critical criminology, and masculinity studies, she positions stranger-rape as a matter of experiences of pain and powerlessness rather than of male power and control. The book’s major achievement is to recognize rapists and rape in their particularity and complexity in the hope that critical thinking about their lives and about their experiences in penal contexts and programs may eventually lead to what one respondent called his ‘road to redemption.’ Please note that this book includes graphic content.

A classic work in postcolonial studies, Masks of Conquest describes the introduction of English studies in India under British rule and illuminates the discipline's transcontinental movements and derivations, showing that the origins of English studies are as diverse and diffuse as its future shape. In her new preface, Gauri Viswanathan argues forcefully that the curricular study of English can no longer be understood innocently of or inattentively to the imperial contexts in which the discipline first articulated its mission.

Cases of sport-related child sexual abuse have received increasing news coverage in recent years. This book documents and evaluates this important issue through a critical investigation of the research and theory on sexual violence and child sex offending that has emerged over the past thirty years. Based on life-history interviews with male and female ‘survivors’ of child sexual abuse in sport, this text offers a deeper appreciation for the experiences of those who are sexually victimized within sports and school-sport settings. Drawing on a wide range of sources, it also provides a new theoretical framework through which child sexual abuse in sport may be explored. Offering a critique spanning psychology, sociology and criminology, this book challenges existing theories of sex offending while advocating an alternative epistemology to help better understand and address this social problem. Presenting an original sociological approach to this field of study, Sexual Abuse in Youth Sport is important reading for any researcher, policy-maker or practitioner working in youth sport, physical education, sports coaching, sport policy, child protection or social work.