Suspicion

In 2014 Barbados introduced a vaccine to prevent certain strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV) and reduce the risk of cervical cancer in young women. Despite the disproportionate burden of cervical cancer in the Caribbean, many Afro-Barbadians chose not to immunize their daughters. In Suspicion, Nicole Charles reframes Afro-Barbadian vaccine refusal from a question of hesitancy to one of suspicion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, black feminist theory, transnational feminist studies and science and technology studies, Charles foregrounds Afro-Barbadians' gut feelings and emotions and the lingering trauma of colonial and biopolitical violence. She shows that suspicion, far from being irrational, is a fraught and generative affective orientation grounded in concrete histories of mistrust of government and coercive medical practices foisted on colonized peoples. By contextualizing suspicion within these longer cultural and political histories, Charles troubles traditional narratives of vaccine hesitancy while offering new entry points into discussions on racialized biopolitics, neocolonialism, care, affect, and biomedicine across the Black diaspora. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Seventeen-year-old Imogene Rockford turned away from her family and their English country manor after her parents' death, but assumes her duty as the new Duchess of Wickersham despite threats and strange occurrences.

Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) was one of the most prolific and influential French philosophers of the Twentieth Century. In his enormous corpus of work he engaged with literature, history, historiography, politics, theology and ethics, while debating 'truth' and ethical solutions to life in the face of widespread and growing suspicion about whether such a search is either possible or worthwhile. In Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion, Alison Scott-Baumann takes a thematic approach that explores Ricoeur's lifelong struggle to be both iconoclastic and yet hopeful, and avoid the slippery slope to relativism. Through an examination of the 'hermeneutics of suspicion', the book reveals strong continuities throughout his work, as well as significant discontinuities, such as the marked way in which he later distanced himself from the 'hermeneutics of suspicion' and his development of new devices in its place, while seeking a hermeneutics of recovery. Scott-Baumann offers a highly original analysis of the hermeneutics of suspicion that will be useful to the fields of philosophy, literature, theology and postmodern social theory.

This book revisits Paul Ricoeur's classification of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud as the “masters of suspicion”, and provides a thought-provoking critique for critical religious studies scholars, as well as anyone working in critical theory more broadly. Whereas Ricoeur saw suspicion as a mode of interpretation, Andrew Dole argues that the method common to his “masters” is better understood as a mode of explanation. Dole replaces Ricoeur's hermeneutics of suspicion with suspicious explanation, which claims the existence of hidden phenomena that are bad in some recognizable way. Each of the masters, Dole argues, offered a distinct kind of suspicious explanation. Reconstructing Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud in this way brings their work into conversation with conspiracy theories, which are themselves a type of suspicious explanation. Dole argues that conspiracy theories and other types of suspicious explanation are “cognitively ensnaring”, to borrow a term from Pascal Boyer. If they are true they are importantly true, but their truth or falsity can be very difficult to ascertain.

At the heart of 21st century discourses are questions of whose lives may matter more than others. While the debates themselves are not new, the #hashtags they are linked to and the media through which concerns around moralities of living together are expressed allow for debates to reach large numbers of people in accelerated, individualised and accessible ways. The new media have been powerful in (re)igniting debates and (re)activating demands for social change. Yet, the focus of ubiquitous #hashtags on binary positions may render it easy to neglect their nuances and facets. In recognition of grey-zones, contradictions and ambiguities, this ethnography focuses on a suburb of Cape Town, Observatory, and its recently revived Neighbourhood Watch as an urban renewal project and attempt to decrease notions of vulnerability to crime and violence. In Observatory – considered to be liberal and bohemian by its inhabitants – the framing of topics within the Neighbourhood Watch group often take on an abstract, intellectualised form. Nevertheless, the group with its rather clashing ideals is grounded in and fuelled by recycled crime stories as well as snapshots of suspected criminals that continue to reappear via various social media channels. Individual experiences, stories and inner conflicts of local Neighbourhood Watch members are at the centre of this exploratory engagement with how fear becomes embodied, everyday practice and the ways in which desires for relationality and spatial exclusivity become entangled in a place where every life matters only in principle.

Many thought the election of our first African American president put an end to the conversation about race in this country, and that America had moved into a post–racial era of equality and opportunity. Then, on the night of February 26, 2012, a black seventeen–year–old boy walking to a friend's home carrying only his cell phone, candy, and a fruit drink, was shot and killed by a neighborhood watch coordinator. And in July 2013, the trial of Zimmerman for murder captivated the public, as did his eventual acquittal. In her provocative and landmark book, Suspicion Nation, Lisa Bloom, who covered the trial from gavel to gavel, posits that none of this was a surprise: Our laws, culture, and blind spots created the conditions that led to Trayvon Martin's death, and made George Zimmerman's acquittal by far the most likely outcome. America today holds an unhealthy preoccupation with firearms that has led to the expansion of gun rights to surreal extremes. America now has not only the highest per capita gun ownership rate in the world (almost one gun per American), but the highest rate of gun deaths. Despite the strides America has made, fighting a bloody Civil War to end slavery, eradicating Jim Crow laws, teaching tolerance, and electing an African American president, racial inequality persists throughout our country, in employment, housing, education, the media, and most institutions. And perhaps most destructively of all, racial biases run deep in every level of our criminal justice system. Suspicion Nation captures a court system and a country conflicted and divided over issues of race, violence, and gun legislation.

_______________________________ 'Frank Lean's novels, featuring stroppy Manchester private eye Dave Cunane, have evolved into beguiling entertainments, skilfully interweaving the righting of wrongs with knockabout violence and comic dialogue' Sunday Times _______________________________ Money, football and crime: private investigator Dave Cunane dives deep into Manchester's seedy underbelly, knowing he may not make it out alive... When a baby girl is kidnapped and £500,000 is demanded for her return, the father - a famous international footballer - hires Dave Cunane, head of Pimpernel Investigations, to track down the girl's kidnappers rather than risk police involvement. Cunane soon realises that his new employer is involved in some highly illegal activities connected to the glamour and drama of the Premier League. As he digs deeper in the case, he uncovers evidences that some of Manchester's most successful criminals are being blackmailed - and as extortion escalates to murder, Cunane knows deep in his heart he has to stop the violence...

The one period that most students of anti-Communism have ignored is the years of the Second World War, when the United States and the Soviet Union briefly stood together as allies against Nazi Germany. During this period, criticizing the Soviet Union and the Communist party abruptly went out of fashion. But even then, there were Americans who chose to be unfashionable. These leaders and opinion-makers are the subject of Sirgiovanni's An Undercurrent of Suspicion. This book demonstrates that the "undercurrent of suspicion" against the Soviet Union, and communism in general, was considerably stronger under World War II than many Americans realize or recall. Many long-time anti-communists refuse to go along with the quasi-official moratorium on criticizing America's Soviet ally, and although the war granted the Communist Party of the United States an unaccustomed degree of legitimacy, this was by no means universally conceded, either. The resilience of such attitudes n what surely were the most auspicious years of the U.S.-Soviet relations contributes to our understanding of why a far more virulent and widespread Cold War mentality of mistrust and hostility burst forth so soon after the Allied victory. Many issues that contributed to the Cold War had been raised during the alliance, such as the political and territorial makeup of Eastern Europe. Those who assumed that the U.S.S.R. could never be trusted to act in a spirit of justice and compassion included conservative politicians, anti-communist labor leaders, right-wing newsmen, Catholics and Protestant fundamentalists, and American Socialists-all of whom Sirigiovani discusses at length. These individuals also insisted that the domestic Communist movement, despite its "patriotic" wartime line, remained in the service of today's ally but tomorrow's probably adversary, Joseph Stalin's U.S.S.R. An Undercurrent of Suspicion will of considerable interest to anyone interested in communism ad anti-communism, American politics, and the history of ideas, especially as they relate to political issues. The general reader will the book provides a new dimension to the war years, and in so doing helps explain the deep background of the Cold War.