The Bailey Library regularly gets new materials. In this post, we’d like to feature a very small selection of some of the new e-book and e-video titles. The included descriptions are provided by either Films on Demand, Kanopy, or Proquest. All told, over 3,000 new electronic titles were added in September.
E-videos provided by Kanopy
Big Cities Are Past Their Prime, A Debate – New York. Los Angeles. Chicago. Call them America's "superstars." With huge, diverse populations, these urban hubs have long reigned as the nation's economic, social, and cultural capitals. But big cities have also been the hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the coronavirus shut down much of the United States in early 2020, "Zoom towns" sprang up across the country as professionals left urban centers in droves. The pandemic-along with nationwide protests following the police killing of George Floyd that spring-also brought racial, social, and economic inequality into sharp focus, and some large cities implemented new progressive policies that aimed to combat this inequality and create a more equitable society. For some people in higher income brackets, this means a new financial structure that could make city life less rewarding. Some argue that large, urban centers will bounce back and continue to thrive, but others argue that they will likely struggle to maintain their magnetism and appeal. Are big cities past their prime?
Decolonizing Mental Health – Decolonizing Mental Health dismantles the racism that underscores the mental healthcare industry. By focusing its gaze on the transformative work of therapists and individuals of color, it calls for a redressal of the ways in which we define psychiatric illness and health.
Ultimate Space Telescope – Follow the dramatic story of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope--the most complex machine ever launched into space--in hopes of peering deeper back in time than ever before and answering some of astronomy's biggest questions.
E-videos provided by Kanopy
Last Journey of Paul W. R. – The red moon threatens our existence on earth. Our only hope is the enigmatic Paul WR, the most talented astronaut of his generation. But a few hours before the start of the great mission, Paul disappears.
Murina – On a remote island along Croatia’s Adriatic coast, 17-year-old Julija spends her days diving for eel with her domineering father Ante and watching other teens party on a nearby yacht. She longs for independence but is unsure how to achieve it, until the arrival of the rich and mysterious Javier seems to offer a way out. But does his affection portend freedom, or something more sinister? MURINA features a ferocious, star-making central performance by Gracija Filipovic and the most sumptuous images of the Mediterranean since The Big Blue. Equal parts fiery feminist outcry and stirring coming-of-age drama, the film announces director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic as a major new talent in world cinema.
Neptune Frost – Multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision, a sci-fi punk musical that’s a visually wondrous amalgamation of themes, ideas, and songs that Williams has previously explored in his work. The film takes place in the hilltops of Burundi, where a group of escaped coltan miners form an anti-colonialist computer hacker collective. From their camp in an otherworldly e-waste dump, they attempt a takeover of the authoritarian regime exploiting the region's natural resources – and its people. When an intersex runaway and an escaped coltan miner find each other through cosmic forces, their connection sparks glitches within the greater divine circuitry.
E-books provided by Proquest
Mobilizing In Uncertainty – How do ordinary people navigate the intense uncertainty of the onset of war? Different individuals mobilize in different ways—some flee, some pick up arms, and some support armed actors as civil war begins. Drawing on nearly two hundred in-depth interviews with participants and nonparticipants in the Georgian-Abkhaz war of 1992–1993, Anastasia Shesterinina explores Abkhaz mobilization decisions during that conflict. Her fresh approach underscores the uncertain nature of the first days of the war when Georgian forces had a preponderance of manpower and arms. Mobilizing in Uncertainty demonstrates, in contrast to explanations that assume individuals know the risk involved in mobilization and make decisions based on that knowledge, that the Abkhaz anticipated risk in ways that were affected by their earlier experiences and by social networks at the time of mobilization. What Shesterinina uncovers is that to make sense of the violence, Abkhaz leaders, local authority figures, and others relied on shared understandings of the conflict and their roles in it—collective conflict identities—that they had developed before the war. As appeals traveled across society, people consolidated mobilization decisions within small groups of family and friends and based their actions on whom they understood to be threatened. Their decisions shaped how the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict unfolded and how people continued to mobilize during and after the war. Through this detailed analysis of Abkhaz mobilization from prewar to postwar, Mobilizing in Uncertainty sheds light on broader processes of violence, which have lasting effects on societies marked by intergroup conflict.
Sin Sick: Moral Injury in War & Literature – In Sin Sick, Joshua Pederson draws on the latest research about identifying and treating the pain of perpetration to advance and deploy a literary theory of moral injury that addresses fictional representations of the mental anguish of those who have injured or killed others. Pederson's work foregrounds moral injury, a recent psychological concept distinct from trauma that is used to describe the psychic wounds suffered by those who breach their own deeply held ethical principles. Complementing writings on trauma theory that posit the textual manifestation of trauma as absence, Sin Sick argues that moral injury appears in literature in a variety of forms of excess. Pederson closely reads works by Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment), Camus (The Fall), and veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (Brian Turner's Here, Bullet; Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds; Phil Klay's Redeployment; and Roy Scranton's War Porn), contending that recognizing and understanding the suffering of perpetrators, without condoning their crimes, enriches the experience of reading—and of being human.
Washington’s Government : Charting the Origins of the Federal Administration – Washington’s Government shows how George Washington’s administration—the subject of remarkably little previous study—was both more dynamic and more uncertain than previously thought. Rather than simply following a blueprint laid out by the Constitution, Washington and his advisors constructed over time a series of possible mechanisms for doing the nation’s business. The results were successful in some cases, disastrous in others. Yet at the end of Washington’s second term, there was no denying that the federal government had achieved remarkable results. As Americans debate the nature of good national governance two and a half centuries after the founding, this volume’s insights appear timelier than ever.
Reuse, Misuse, Abuse : The Ethics of Audiovisual Appropriation in the Digital Era – In contemporary culture, existing audiovisual recordings are constantly reused and repurposed for various ends, raising questions regarding the ethics of such appropriations, particularly when the recording depicts actual people and events. Every reuse of a preexisting recording is, on some level, a misuse in that it was not intended or at least anticipated by the original maker, but not all misuses are necessarily unethical. In fact, there are many instances of productive misuse that seem justified. At the same time, there are other instances in which the misuse shades into abuse. Documentary scholars have long engaged with the question of the ethical responsibility of documentary makers in relation to their subjects. But what happens when this responsibility is set at a remove, when the recording already exists for the taking and repurposing? Reuse, Misuse and Abuse surveys a range of contemporary films and videos that appropriate preexisting footage and attempts to theorize their ethical implications.
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