The Visible Poor

Taking an in-depth look at the causes of homelessness in the United States, Joel Blau disproves the convenient myths that most homeless are crazy, drug addicts, or lazy misfits who brought their suffering upon themselves. He shows that the current crisis was an inevitable result of economic and political changes in recent decades, systematically reviewing the explanations offered by researchers, politicians and pundits, from the deinstitutionalization of mental patients in the 1960s to the gentrification of urban neighborhoods in the 1970s to the evisceration of federal spending on social welfare in the 1980s. Blau argues that current government policies at every level are mired in pointless headcounting and quick-fix solutions that only push the homeless out of sight without touching the underlying causes. He advocates social reforms ranging form a national standard for welfare benefits, a higher minimum wage, and establishment of a social sector for non-profit, affordable housing. A powerful contribution to public debate on homelessness, The Visible Poor must be read by concerned citizens as well as by policy-makers and advocates.

In The Visible and the Revealed, Jean-Luc Marion brings together his most significant papers dealing with the relationship between philosophy and theology. Covering the ground from some of his earliest writings on this topic to very recent reflections, they are particularly useful for understanding the progression of Marion's thought on such topics as the saturated phenomenon and the possibility of something like Christian Philosophy.The book contains his seminal pieces on the saturated phenomenon and on the gift, although the essays also explore more recent developments of his thought on these topics. Several chapters explicitly explore the boundary line between philosophy and theology or their mutual enrichment and influence. In one of the final pieces, The Banality of Saturation,Marion considers some of the most recent objections brought against his notion of the saturated phenomenon and responds to them in detail, suggesting that saturated phenomena are neither as rare nor as inflexible as often assumed. The work contains two chapters not previously available in English and brings together several other pieces previously translated but now difficult to find. For readers interested in the relation between the two disciplines,this is indispensable reading.

Already in 1929, Walter Benjamin described “a one hundred per cent image-space.” Such an image space saturates our world now more than ever, constituting the visibility in which we live. The Supermarket of the Visible analyzes this space and the icons that populate it as the culmination of a history of the circulation and general commodification of images and gazes. From the first elevators and escalators (tracking shots avant la lettre) to cinema (the great conductor of gazes), all the way down to contemporary eye-tracking techniques that monitor the slightest saccades of our eyes, Peter Szendy offers an entirely novel theory of the intersection of the image and economics. The Supermarket of the Visible elaborates an economy proper to images, icons, in other words, an iconomy. Deleuze caught a glimpse of this when he wrote that “money is the back side of all the images that cinema shows and edits on the front.” Since “cinema,” for Deleuze, is synonymous with “universe,” Szendy argues that this sentence must be understood in its broadest dimension and that a reading of key works in the history of cinema allows us a unique vantage point upon the reverse of images, their monetary implications. Paying close attention to sequences in Hitchcock, Bresson, Antonioni, De Palma, and The Sopranos, Szendy shows how cinema is not a uniquely commercial art form among other, purer arts, but, more fundamentally, helps to elaborate what might be called, with Bataille, a general iconomy. Moving deftly and lightly between political economy, aesthetic theory, and popular movies and television, The Supermarket of the Visible will be a necessary book for anyone concerned with media, philosophy, politics, or visual culture.

A Visible Witness presents a fresh, innovative perspective on a vital movement in twentieth-century theology. Protestant theology in Latin America emerged over fifty years ago, side-by-side with the initial development of Roman Catholic liberation theology. Both traditions have common theological interests: the praxical nature of theology, Christology, and soteriology. Protestants also share some of the fundamental intuitions of liberation theology: the centrality of praxis in Christian life and the priority of opting for the suffering masses. Key Protestant theologians like José Míguez Bonino, Nancy Bedford, and Guillermo Hansen challenged Protestant theology in Latin America to develop a Trinitarian hermeneutic for Christology in order to see the work of salvation as the work of the triune God, and to relate Christology and pneumatology in ways that fundamentally shape the praxis of the church. This dissertation takes on this challenge and proposes a theodramatic Christology that serves to ground the Christian notion of salvation as historical liberation and the church’s participation in the present experience of redemption in the Trinitarian and economic work of Jesus Christ. The ecclesia of believers participates in God’s communicative activity via union with Christ—the community of disciples becomes a theater of liberation.

Select the right task, at the right time, for the right phase of learning How do you generate that lightbulb “aha” moment of understanding for your students? This book helps to answer that question by showing Visible Learning strategies in action in high-impact mathematics classrooms. Walk in the shoes of teachers as they engage in the countless micro-decisions required to balance strategies, tasks, and assessments, demonstrating that it’s not only what works, but when. A decision-making matrix and grade-leveled examples help you leverage the most effective teaching practices at the most effective time to meet the surface, deep, and transfer learning needs of every student.

'This book represents an important next step in the new institutional economics. Using this perspective, it undertakes a thorough re-examination of the problems of development.' – Barry R. Weingast, Stanford University, US 'Institutions, Economic Performance and the Visible Hand is a wide ranging, well-written, and provocative contribution to the study of political and economic organization. Ashok Chakravarti advances arguments and interpretations that are both interesting and, often, controversial. Although I find myself "arguing" with many of them, this is one of the many virtues of the book. I recommend the book to others who have an interest in institutional economics – why it is important, where it has been, and where it is going.' – Oliver E. Williamson, Nobel Laureate in Economics, University of California, Berkeley, US 'This is an ambitious and wide-ranging book, which seeks to overthrow the minimalist view of the role of institutions in economic systems contained in the standard economic model, and instead advocates a more active institution-building effort to promote the development of poor countries. This important contribution is to review and consolidate the themes and issues that emerge from a very large literature on the subject of institutions and economic development, and to coherently formulate hypotheses relating institutions to economic performance. This should be useful to a wide range of scholars.' – John Toye, University of Oxford, UK This timely study convincingly argues that it is not resources but the institutions which govern the interaction and decision-making of economic and political agents, that are the key factor in determining the economic performance of nations. The book challenges the conventional wisdom on the determinants of economic performance and provides an alternative vision of the functioning of an economic system. The author provides a structured survey which critically evaluates the theory and evidence of neoclassical approaches to growth and development. He then skillfully integrates insights from the old and new institutional economics into an original and comprehensive vision of the relationship between institutions, growth and economic development. Institutions, Economic Performance and the Visible Hand will be of special interest to academics, financial analysts and commentators, staff of international development agencies and NGOs, researchers and post-graduate students.