This book is a heartfelt guide that gently leads readers through a journey of improving their relationships. Its pages are filled with a treasure trove of tools, techniques, and exercises that are designed to uplift and strengthen the bonds between partners who are already in relationships. This book also seeks to help single people stand the best chance of their future relationships lasting.The core intention of this book is to empower individuals with the means to nurture their r...

Honorable Mention, 2018 Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book AwardWinner, Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship from CCCC, 2018Winner, Advancement of Knowledge Award from CCCC, 2018Winner, Outstanding Book Award from the Conference on Community Writing, 2017Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy analyzes the life stories of sixty Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people along with...

Clothes to Make You Smile is a picture book biography about Patrick Kelly, one of fashion’s most influential Black designers, joyously told by fashion expert and educator Eric Darnell Pritchard and beautifully illustrated by award-winning artist Shannon Wright.Patrick Kelly was one of the most influential fashion designers of the twentieth century, but growing up in Vicksburg, Mississippi, he didn’t see many boys who liked to sew. That did...

Where is the academic study of music today, and what paths should it take into the future? Should we be looking at how music relates to society and constructs meaning through it, rather than how it transcends the social? Can we ‘remix’ our discipline and attempt to address all musics on an equal basis, without splitting ourselves in advance into subgroups of ‘musicologists’, ‘theorists’, and ‘ethnomusicologists’? These are some of the crucial issues that Nicholas Cook has raised since he e...

Life is to be lived. Experiences gained, pleasures sampled. But, troublingly, when you are a classic author your thoughts sometimes lean towards darker thoughts. Within the space of a few paragraphs these literary masters shape a new world; more difficult experiences, darker pleasures. Life becomes uneasy, a queasy feeling, perhaps a repulsion here, a disgust there and very soon what was cosy, warm and comfortable becomes cold, painful, even horrific.The talents of their pens now f...

An author’s talents may seem obvious and indisputable as they move words and ideas into gathered phrases and stories.But where do these ideas and stories come from? A lonely thought that suddenly gathers form? An inspiration from a Muse? A suggestion from an everyday event?Perhaps in the case of their darker, more malevolent stories, other forces are at work. They help to nourish single words into sentences and paragraphs that ease themselves from the shadows and are sudden...

In this series we turn the pages of classic short stories to put together the literary building blocks of how a particular genre or theme began, how it built its foundations to become the well-loved and well-worn genre that it is today.Do authors have the same ideas at more or less the same time? Or can they sniff out an opportunity as to which way the tastes of an audience are moving.Success undoubtedly builds success and in literary terms we can more politely say that imi...

This brief and engagingly written book provides a unique introduction to the process of social inquiry and the theoretical and methodological frameworks that support that inquiry, offering a strong foundation in critical thinking that is rooted in the social sciences but maintains relevance across the disciplines.

Prominent sociologist Dorothy Smith outlines a method of inquiry that uses everyday experience as a lens to examine social relations and social institutions. Concerned with articulating an inclusive sociology that goes beyond looking at a particular group of people from the detached viewpoint of the researcher, this is a method of inquiry for people, incorporating the expert's research and language into everyday experience to examine social relations and institutions. The book begins by ex...

What makes a speech community? How do they evolve? How are speech communities identified? Speech communities are central to our understanding of how language and interactions occur in societies around the world and in this book readers will find an overview of the main concepts and critical arguments surrounding how language and communication styles distinguish and identify groups. Speech communities are not organized around linguistic facts but around people who want to share their opinio...

Talk of love surrounds us, and romance is a constant concern of popular culture. Ann Swidler's Talk of Love is an attempt to discover how people find and sustain real love in the midst of that talk, and how that culture of love shapes their expectations and behavior in the process. To this end, Swidler conducted extensive interviews with Middle Americans and wound up offering us something more than an insightful exploration of love: Talk of Love is also a compelling study...

This landmark text was one of the first to introduce and analyze contemporary concepts of curriculum that emerged from the Reconceptualization of curriculum studies in the 1970s and 1980s. This new edition brings readers up to date on the major research themes (postmodernism,ecological, hermeneutics, aesthetics and arts-based research, race, class, gender, sexuality, and classroom practices) within the historical development of the field from the 1950s to the present. Like the previous edi...