Books submitted to Encompass will be reviewed for possible inclusion in EKU Libraries' collection and featured in the EKU Faculty and Staff Books Gallery. The Books Gallery showcases books written or edited by Eastern Kentucky University faculty and staff, while disseminating the work of faculty and staff to the broader academic community. Other Eastern Kentucky University faculty and staff scholarship is highlighted in our EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship series.
Faculty and staff, you may submit your work here. NOTE: First time submitters will be prompted to create a free Encompass account.
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The Relativity of Deviance
John Curra
The Relativity of Deviance is a primer on the constructivist perspective on deviance—the idea that deviance cannot be explained in terms of absolutes, nor can it be understood apart from its social setting. The book is frequently used alongside all of the major core deviance textbooks on the market. It answers such questions as: What is deviant? What is deviant behavior? How should the deviant be treated? Why is the same act sometimes praised and sometimes condemned? Readers will see that what qualifies as deviance varies from place to place, time to time, and situation to situation. The book explores some of the most frequent contexts for deviant behavior in ways that challenge definitive or objective judgments.
The Fifth Edition has been updated to include the most current developments in American society, including deviance at the highest levels of national politics and corporate life, sex abuse scandals, the opioid crisis, and the growing decriminalization of marijuana -
The Rhetoric of Lincoln's Letters
Marshall Myers
Lincoln's letters have been cited in countless biographical and critical works yet have received little scholarly attention as a whole. This comprehensive study reveals his letters to be fundamental to understanding his development as a writer. Early on, he employed Hugh Blair's popular idea of developing "taste" in written documents, and carefully studied the letters of his contemporaries. He wrote more than 5000 of his own. As he became more proficient, he employed more sophisticated rhetorical strategies to deal with political opponents, imperious generals and critics of his policies.
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The Routledge Reader on Writing Centers and New Media
Russell Carpenter
This collection of essays appears on the wave of digital media tutoring developments in university and college writing centers in the United States and around the world. It provides students and scholars of literacy, new media, and communication as well as writing center practitioners with a valuable new tool for understanding the progress and direction of new media debates at the intersection of writing, technology, and communication.
Comprised of twenty essays by leading scholars in media, communication, composition, and writing center studies, Writing Centers and New Media is a major new reader that provides rich cross-disciplinary scholarship. As a rich resource for students and scholars, and as a sourcebook for writing center practitioners, this collection fills a critical gap in writing center scholarship that is essential and significant for the emerging practice of new media tutoring and for future developments in writing center studies.
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The Violence of Neoliberalism: Crime, Harm and Inequality
Victoria E. Collins
This book examines the impact of neoliberalism on society, bringing to the forefront a discussion of violence and harm, the inherent inequalities of neoliberalism and the ways in which our everyday lives in the Global North reproduce and facilitate this violence and harm.
Drawing on a range of contemporary topics such as state violence, the carceral state, patriarchy, toxic masculinity, death, sports and entertainment, this book unmasks the banal forms of violence and harm that are a routine part of life that usurp, commodify and consume to reify the existing status quo of harm and inequality. It aims to defamiliarize routine forms of violence and inequality, thereby highlighting our own participation in its perpetuation, though consumerism and the consumption of neoliberal dogma.
It is essential reading for students across criminology, sociology and political philosophy, particularly those engaged with crimes of the powerful, state crime and social harm. -
Transforming Your Students into Deep Learners: A Guide for Instructors
Hal Blythe, Charlie Sweet, and Russell Carpenter
This title is intended as a follow-up to Achieving Excellence in Teaching: A Self-help Guide (2014). In Chapter Three of the latter, the authors posited deep learning the major goal of higher education. This book elaborates on the concept of deep learning and offers a rationale for why K-12 students have difficulty with college teaching—overcoming the learning gap. To help concerned instructors instill deep learning in their students, the book provides the Excellent Eight, specific strategies based on recent research and experience.
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Understanding world Christianity: Mexico
Todd Hartch
Christianity is a global religion! It's an obvious fact, but one often missed or ignored in too many books and conversations. In a world where Christianity is growing everywhere but the West, the Understanding World Christianity series offers a fresh, readable orientation to Christianity around the world.
Understanding World Christianity is organized geographically, by nation and region. Noted experts, in most cases native to the area of focus, present a balanced history of Christianity and a detailed discussion of the faith as it is lived today. Each volume addresses six key 'intersections' of Christianity in a given context including the historical, denominational, socio-political, geographical, biographical and theological settings.
Accessible in tone and brief in length, Understanding World Christianity: Mexico is an ideal introduction for students, mission leaders, and all who wish to know how Christianity is influenced, and is influenced by, the Mexican context.
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Untangling the Knot: Queer Voices on Marriage, Relationships & Identity
Carter Sickels
Untangling the Knot: Marriage, Relationships & Identity, an anthology of essays and creative nonfiction, delves past the mainstream focus on marriage equality―beyond the knot― to examine the broad scope of issues facing members of the LGBTQ community. The collection sheds light on what marriage equality actually means for queer communities. By confronting the concept of tradition through personal discourse, this volume seeks to create conversation amongst the diverse members of the LGBTQ community and their straight allies to prompt a larger, grander, and more realistic vision of what marriage equality really means for those living in the United States. Untangling the Knot: Marriage, Relationships & Identity includes the voices of many individuals who are underrepresented in the modern discourse surrounding LGBTQ rights, and these unique perspectives may change the direction of that conversation for good.
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Viable
Julie Hensley
To enter Julie Hensley's Viable is not to step but to plunge. . . With Hensley's guide, we travel through deftly rendered landscapes of the Great Plains and the rural South. We study the language of horses and historical figures. We probe marriage, miscarriage, childbirth, and child-rearing, "the things people plant to anchor themselves/ beneath so much sky." We hear our own fears and wants echoing back to us from the deeply human center of this book. —Julie Marie Wade, author of Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems and When I Was Straight: Poems
In the rich and vivid poems of Viable, Julie Hensley rings the changes of a girl child’s life, from riding stick-horses in her yard in Big Stone Gap to sexual discovery after sixteen summers, to homesickness in her first apartment, then to love, marriage and, motherhood. The path may be familiar, but none of it is simple, and there are sharp turns of grief and reckoning along the way. Rooted in the natural world—mountain, desert, prairie, seashore—and seeing herself as a creature among creatures, Hensley offers us words of life in all its uncertainty, knowing that “Creation is still a gift/ a yolk bobbing uncertainly/ inside a fragile shell.”—George Ella Lyon (Kentucky Poet Laureate 2015-2016), author of Many-Storied House
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Virtues in Action: New Essays in Applied Virtue Ethics
Michael W. Austin
In recent decades, many philosophers have considered the strengths and weaknesses of a virtue-centered approach to moral theory. Much less attention has been given to how such an approach bears on issues in applied ethics. The essays in this volume apply a virtue-centered perspective to a variety of contemporary moral issues, and in so doing offer a fresh and illuminating perspective. Some of the essays focus on a particular virtue and its application to one or more realms of applied ethics, such as temperance and sex or humility and environmental ethics. Other chapters focus on an issue in applied ethics and bring several virtues into a discussion of that issue or realm of life, such as sport, education, and business. Finally, several of the chapters engage relevant psychological research as well as current neuroscience, which enhances the strength of the philosophical arguments.
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Visual Criminology
Bill McClanahan
From fine art to popular digital culture, criminologists are increasingly engaged in the processes of the visual.
In this pioneering work, Bill McClanahan provides a concise and lively overview of the origins and contemporary role of visual criminology. Detailing and employing the most prominent approaches at work in visual criminology, this book explores the visual perspective in relation to prisons, police, the environment, and drugs, while noting the complex social and ethical implications embedded in visual research.
This original book broadens the horizons of criminological engagement and reveals how visual criminology offers new and critical ways to understand and theorize crime and harm.
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Voices of African Immigrants in Kentucky: Migration, Identity, and Transnationality
Iddah Otieno
Following historical and theoretical overview of African immigration, the heart of this book is based on oral history interviews with forty-seven of the more than twenty-two thousand Africa-born immigrants in Kentucky. From a former ambassador from Gambia, a pharmacist from South Africa, a restaurant owner from Guinea, to a certified nursing assistant from the Democratic Republic of Congo—every immigrant has a unique and complex story of their life experiences and the decisions that led them to emigrate to the United States. The compelling narratives reveal why and how the immigrants came to the Bluegrass state—whether it was coming voluntarily as a student or forced because of war—and how they connect with and contribute to their home countries as well as to the US. The immigrants describe their challenges—language, loneliness, cultural differences, credentials for employment, ignorance towards Africa, and racism—and positive experiences such as education, job opportunities, and helpful people. One chapter focuses on family—including interviews with the second generations—and how the immigrants identify themselves.
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War & homecoming : veteran identity and the post-9/11 generation
Travis L. Martin
Critically examines representations of veterans in patriotic rhetoric, popular media, literature, and the lives of those who served. From this analysis, a new veteran identity emerges-veterans as storytellers who reject stereotypes, claim their symbolic authority, and define themselves through literature, art, and service. Their dynamic approach to life after military service allows for continued growth, agency, individuality, and inspiring examples of resilience for others
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Water, Crime and Security in the Twenty-First Century: Too Dirty, Too Little, Too Much
Avi Brisman and Bill McClanahan
Water, Crime and Security in the Twenty-First Century represents criminology’s first book-length contribution to the study of water and water-related crimes, harms and security. The chapters cover topics such as: water pollution, access to fresh water in the Global North and Global South, water and climate change, the commodification of water and privatization, water security and pacification, and activism and resistance surrounding issues of access and pollution. With examples ranging from Rio de Janeiro to Flint, Michigan to the Thames River, this original study offers a comprehensive criminological overview of the contemporary and historical relationship between water and crime. Coinciding with the International Decade for Action, “Water for Sustainable Development,” 2018–2028, this timely volume will be of particular relevance to students and scholars of green criminology, as well as those interested in critical geography, environmental anthropology, environmental sociology, political ecology, and the study of corporate crime and state crime.
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Weird Wild West: True Tales of the Strange and Gothic
Keven McQueen
The Wild West is infamous for its outrageous stories, cowboys, and gun battles. But the region is also known for its ghost stories, unexplained deaths, bizarre murders, and peculiar burials.
In Weird Wild West, author Keven McQueen brings together a fabulous collection of tales of the darker and stranger side of Texas, Oklahoma, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, Oregon, and Washington. Exploring mysterious deaths, true crime stories, and paranormal activity, this eerie collection uncovers long buried and disturbing stories of the region. Included are the unforgettable tales of the body-snatching of Billy the Kid, the revenge curse of a former deputy district attorney in Colorado, and the weird tale of Mr. Moon, who couldn't keep his dearly departed wife in the ground despite his best efforts.
An intriguing, frightful, and entertaining exploration of the strange and gothic side of the Western states, Weird Wild West promises to send chills down your spine.