Yearning For Dis Connections

In a nuanced consideration of the Cameroonian experience, Yearning for (Dis) Connections makes critical interventions into debates about coexistence, citizenship, identity formation and performance, democracy and modernity in Cameroon. The essays in the book ranges across Francophone and Anglophone Cameroons to provide a challenging assessment of the common ways of writing and thinking for and of and about the Cameroonian world. The book criticises the blinders of Cameroon's Francophonecentred leadership, analysing its failure to heed Anglophone Cameroon's ontological and epistemological critiques of Cameroon's ongoing exclusions masked by pretences of a Francophone universalism. Yosimbom uses the works of Nyamnjoh, Ndi, Besong and Takwi to explore how Cameroonian worlds are on the move of and for identity negotiations. He also explores how the uneven development of those Cameroonian worlds has been creating growing gaps within and among regions while at the same time Francophonising Anglophones and Anglophonising Francophones through four-fold processes of complementarities, continuity and discontinuity, diachrony and synchrony. The book demonstrates that persistent Francophone hegemony and resurgent Anglophone nationalism often fail to realise that all Cameroonians have been shuffled like a pack of cards; that cultures are formed through complex dialogues and interactions with other cultures; that the boundaries of cultures are fluid, porous and contested; that identities are multiple and layered in complex, pluralist democratic societies; and that there is need for public recognition of cultural and identity specificities in ways that do not deny their fluidity, nimbleness and incompleteness.

In this important third volume from the Stone Center at Wellesley College, founding scholars and new voices expand and deepen the Center's widely embraced psychological theory of connection as the core of human growth and development. Demonstrating the increasing sophistication of Relational-Cultural Theory (RCT), the volume presents an absorbing and practical examination of connection and disconnection at both individual and societal levels. Chapters explore how experiences of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, and gender influence relationships, and how people can connect across difference and disagreement. Also discussed are practical implications of the theory for psychotherapy, for the raising of sons, and for workplace and organizational issues.

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Relational-Cultural theory (RCT) proposes that all people grow through and toward relationships throughout the lifespan. RCT challenges prevailing theories that depict the "separate self" as the hallmark of maturity. Rather than movement toward autonomy and separation, RCT suggests we develop ever more differentiated ways of connecting. An increase in growth-fostering relationships results in: a sense of vitality and zest; increasing clarity about ourselves and others; augmented creativity and ability to take action; an experience of worth and empowerment; and a desire for more connectedness with others. Disconnections are inevitable in relationships and RCT focuses on relational resilience, the ways people can re-establish positive and growth-fostering relationships. RCT further emphasizes the importance of cultural and societal forces in causing either growth-fostering connection or destructive disconnection. This volume explores the process of change in therapy and in other relationships; how race and other forms of stratification create pain; and how people develop resilience and strength in relationships characterized by mutuality. This book was based on a special issue of Women and Therapy.

This volume takes up themes emergent from the 7th International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry (ISPI) which invited participants to reflect on the United Nations Declaration of 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages. In this refereed collection, Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors use poetic inquiry to explore the importance of their ancestral languages and lands, and consider the Indigenous languages and peoples of the lands where they live. Situated in diverse global contexts, poet-researchers examine the intersectionality of their languages, their lands, and their sense of belonging. They offer relational understandings of, and articulate obligations for, their environment and communities. Through stories of shared generational pain and renewal, each author brings the reader into their world of learning and growth. They do this through discourses of belonging and relational responsibilities that tie them to a place, a genealogy. As a method of study that incorporates poetry into academic research, poetic inquiry is concerned with particularity, complexity, and transformations. Making research more visceral and evocative, it invites researchers to examine and engage with the knowledge they seek through a continual process of questioning, welcoming, and awareness. In this volume, poetic inquiry helps to honor languages and histories taken for granted; it allows looking back in order to reexamine, redefine, and make sense of the present and its shortcomings while reimagining a different future. This work seeks to reclaim, through poetic inquiry, wisdom of language, land, and belonging.

Hop on Pop showcases the work of a new generation of scholars—from fields such as media studies, literature, cinema, and cultural studies—whose writing has been informed by their ongoing involvement with popular culture and who draw insight from their lived experiences as critics, fans, and consumers. Proceeding from their deep political commitment to a new kind of populist grassroots politics, these writers challenge old modes of studying the everyday. As they rework traditional scholarly language, they search for new ways to write about our complex and compelling engagements with the politics and pleasures of popular culture and sketch a new and lively vocabulary for the field of cultural studies. The essays cover a wide and colorful array of subjects including pro wrestling, the computer games Myst and Doom, soap operas, baseball card collecting, the Tour de France, karaoke, lesbian desire in the Wizard of Oz, Internet fandom for the series Babylon 5, and the stress-management industry. Broader themes examined include the origins of popular culture, the aesthetics and politics of performance, and the social and cultural processes by which objects and practices are deemed tasteful or tasteless. The commitment that binds the contributors is to an emergent perspective in cultural studies, one that engages with popular culture as the culture that "sticks to the skin," that becomes so much a part of us that it becomes increasingly difficult to examine it from a distance. By refusing to deny or rationalize their own often contradictory identifications with popular culture, the contributors ensure that the volume as a whole reflects the immediacy and vibrancy of its objects of study. Hop on Pop will appeal to those engaged in the study of popular culture, American studies, cultural studies, cinema and visual studies, as well as to the general educated reader. Contributors. John Bloom, Gerry Bloustein, Aniko Bodroghkozy, Diane Brooks, Peter Chvany, Elana Crane, Alexander Doty, Rob Drew, Stephen Duncombe, Nick Evans, Eric Freedman, Joy Fuqua, Tony Grajeda, Katherine Green, John Hartley, Heather Hendershot, Henry Jenkins, Eithne Johnson, Louis Kaplan, Maria Koundoura, Sharon Mazer, Anna McCarthy, Tara McPherson, Angela Ndalianis, Edward O’Neill, Catherine Palmer, Roberta Pearson, Elayne Rapping, Eric Schaefer, Jane Shattuc, Greg Smith, Ellen Strain, Matthew Tinkhom, William Uricchio, Amy Villarego, Robyn Warhol, Charles Weigl, Alan Wexelblat, Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Nabeel Zuberi

Untangling the private feelings, ambitions, and fears of early Americans through their personal writings from the Revolution to the Civil War. Modern readers of history and biography unite around a seemingly straightforward question: What did it feel like to live in the past? In Longing for Connection, historian Andrew Burstein attempts to answer this question with a vigorous, nuanced emotional history of the United States from its founding to the Civil War. Through an examination of the letters, diaries, and other personal texts of the time, along with popular poetry and novels, Burstein shows us how early Americans expressed deep emotions through shared metaphors and borrowed verse in their longing for meaning and connection. He reveals how literate, educated Americans—both well-known and more obscure—expressed their feelings to each other and made attempts at humor, navigating an anxious world in which connection across spaces was difficult to capture. In studying the power of poetry and literature as expressions of inner life, Burstein conveys the tastes of early Americans and illustrates how emotions worked to fashion myths of epic heroes, such as the martyr Nathan Hale, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln. He also studies the public's fears of ocean travel, their racial blind spots, and their remarkable facility for political satire. Burstein questions why we seek a connection to the past and its emotions in the first place. America, he argues, is shaped by a persistent belief that the past is reachable and that its lessons remain intact, which represents a major obstacle in any effort to understand our national history. Burstein shows, finally, that modern readers exhibit a similar capacity for rationalization and that dire longing for connection across time and space as the people he studies.

The central concepts of the theory of interpersonal neurobiology. Many fields have explored the nature of mental life from psychology to psychiatry, literature to linguistics. Yet no common “framework” where each of these important perspectives can be honored and integrated with one another has been created in which a person seeking their collective wisdom can find answers to some basic questions, such as, What is the purpose of life? Why are we here? How do we know things, how are we conscious of ourselves? What is the mind? What makes a mind healthy or unwell? And, perhaps most importantly: What is the connection among the mind, the brain, and our relationships with one another? Our mental lives are profoundly relational. The interactions we have with one another shape our mental world. Yet as any neuroscientist will tell you, the mind is shaped by the firing patterns in the brain. And so how can we reconcile this tension—that the mind is both embodied and relational? Interpersonal Neurobiology is a way of thinking across this apparent conceptual divide. This Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology is designed to aid in your personal and professional application of the interpersonal neurobiology approach to developing a healthy mind, an integrated brain, and empathic relationships. It is also designed to assist you in seeing the intricate foundations of interpersonal neurobiology as you read other books in the Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology. Praise for Daniel J. Siegel's books: “Siegel is a must-read author for anyone interested in the science of the mind.” —Daniel Goleman, author of Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships “[S]tands out for its skillful weaving together of the interpersonal, the inner world, the latest science, and practical applications.” —Jack Kornfield, PhD, founding teacher of the Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock Center, and author of A Path With Heart “Siegel has both a meticulous understanding of the roles of different parts of the brain and an intimate relationship with mindfulness . . . [A]n exciting glimpse of an uncharted territory of neuroscience.” —Scientific American Mind “Dr. Daniel Siegel is one of the most thoughtful, eloquent, scientifically solid and reputable exponents of mind/body/brain integration in the world today.” —Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, author of Wherever You Go, There You Are, Full Catastrophe Living, and Coming to Our Senses