On The Spirit Of Rights

By the end of the eighteenth century, politicians in America and France were invoking the natural rights of man to wrest sovereignty away from kings and lay down universal basic entitlements. Exactly how and when did “rights” come to justify such measures? In On the Spirit of Rights, Dan Edelstein answers this question by examining the complex genealogy of the rights that regimes enshrined in the American and French Revolutions. With a lively attention to detail, he surveys a sprawling series of debates among rulers, jurists, philosophers, political reformers, writers, and others who were all engaged in laying the groundwork for our contemporary systems of constitutional governance. Every seemingly new claim about rights turns out to be a variation on a theme, as late medieval notions were subtly repeated and refined to yield the talk of “rights” we recognize today. From the Wars of Religion to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, On the Spirit of Rights is a sweeping tour through centuries of European intellectual history and an essential guide to our ways of thinking about human rights today.

What does it mean to be a white settler on land taken from peoples who have lived there since time immemorial? In the context of reconciliation and Indigenous resurgence, Unsettling Spirit provides a personal perspective on decolonization, informed by Indigenous traditions and lifeways, and the need to examine one's complicity with colonial structures. Applying autoethnography grounded in Indigenous and feminist methodologies, Denise Nadeau weaves together stories and reflections on how to live with integrity on stolen and occupied land. The author chronicles her early and brief experience of "Native mission" in the late 1980s and early 1990s in northern Canada and Chiapas, Mexico, and the gradual recognition that she had internalized colonialist concepts of the "good Christian" and the Great White Helper. Drawing on somatic psychotherapy, Nadeau addresses contemporary manifestations of helping and the politics of trauma. She uncovers her ancestors' settler background and the responsibilities that come with facing this history. Caught between two traditions – born and raised Catholic but challenged by Indigenous ways of life – the author traces her engagement with Indigenous values and how relationships inform her ongoing journey. A foreword by Cree-Métis author Deanna Reder places the work in a broader context of Indigenous scholarship. Incorporating insights from Indigenous ethical and legal frameworks, Unsettling Spirit offers an accessible reflection on possibilities for settler decolonization as well as for decolonizing Christian and interfaith practice.

First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Explains how Americans need to develop or restore a sense of community in order to reconstruct society.

As the author-pay model spreads across academic publishing, what are the possible consequences? Will the current rage for open-source scholarship actually accomplish anything other than shifting the furniture around on the Titanic? Will not Open Source in combination with Digital Humanitiesfurther destroy the very idea of "slow" and "thoughtful" work in humanistic studies?...It would seem that the author-pay model (formerly attributed to predatory publishers) is just another way of extracting tribute for the "privilege" of being published-enforceable only because academia has ratcheted up the stakes by enforcing research metrics and citations, in the public universities a practice that is primarily enforced by external "industrial" connections. Almost all public and private universities are heading toward measuring output with metrics-many academics now tailoring their CVs to show why they are "important," mirroring the social-media campaigns of celebrities and politicians, and many universities now citing their own "corporate" rankings when promoting their product (the University, the Institute, the Department, the Professor). Where this is all going is toward increased precarity for anyone who does not play the game. Individual, solitary scholars will have few options. Gavin Keeney, "Symptom 'A': The End," Knowledge, Spirit, LawKnowledge, Spirit, Law - as project - is a de facto phenomenology of scholarship in the age of Cognitive Capitalism. The six essays (plus Appendices) presented here cover topics and circle themes related to the problems and crises specific to neo-liberal academia, while proposing creative paths around the various obstructions. The obstructions include metrics-obsessed academia, circular and incestuous peer review, digitalization of research as stalking horse for text- and data-mining, and violation by global corporate fiat of Intellectual Property Rights and the Moral Rights of Authors. These issues, while addressed obliquely in the main text, definitively inform the various implied proscriptive aspects of the essays and, via the Introduction and Appendices, underscore the necessity of developing new-old means to no obvious end in the production of knowledge - that is to say, a return to forms of non-instrumentalized intellectual inquiry. To be developed in two concurrent volumes, Knowledge, Spirit, Law will serve as a "moving and/or shifting anthology" of new forms of expression in humanistic studies.TABLE OF CONTENTS // Preface/Acknowledgments - Introduction: Radical Scholarship - Essay 1: Re-universalizing Knowledge - Essay 2: Estranged Dawns - Essay 3: The Film-essay - Essay 4: Film Mysticism and "The Haunted Wood" - Essay 5: Circular Discourses - Essay 6: Verb Tenses and Time-senses - Appendix A: Agence 'X' Publishing Advisory - Appendix B: Perpetual Petition for the Right of the Author to Have No Digital Rights - Appendix C: Symptom "A" The End - References

A pioneering study in the history of social rights, filling a significant gap in human rights scholarship and practice.