Books on the topic 'Samuel Selvon'

In this chapter we propose that organizational identities—particularly organizational selves (Pratt and Kraatz, 2011)—are socially constructed in the service of personal identity projects. Building on institutional theory, we propose institutional inhabitants facing the myriad pressures associated with institutional pluralism respond with agency, socially constructing selves for organizations and appropriating them, through affiliation, as a resource in resolving those pressures in their personal identity projects. We then interrogate how and when this perspective may effect change in organizational identities and selves. We close the chapter by showing how this perspective applies in the comparison of three organizations existing in the same institutional environment and discussing implications of this perspective for future research on organizational identity.

This book provides guidance and tools to help PhD students and junior faculty members successfully navigate and mature through the various stages of an academic career. Senior faculty members can use this book as a source of ideas to advise their PhD students and junior colleagues. This book presents knowledge that is seldom imparted in PhD programs, and organizes the same as advice and tools related to achieving success at research, teaching and service, all while maintaining work-life balance. The advice and tools provided are based on years of experience of the author and guest contributors, who have successfully navigated many of the same challenges and mentored many PhD students and junior faculty members. This book is suitable both for those who seek careers in research universities or universities that promote greater balance across research, teaching and service.

Locke’s construal of selves, persons, and thinking substances is notoriously difficult and the subject of wide controversy. In this chapter, it is suggested that we could go some way towards clarifying it by seeing it in the context of Descartes’s construal of the same or similar issues. The chapter argues that there are both strong threads of continuity (which may appear even stronger in the light of the recent reappraisal of Descartes’s so-called dualism) and a quite obvious (but often neglected) anti-Cartesian strand in Locke’s doctrine of the self. The target is to assess precisely where and why Locke departs from Descartes. The chapter shows, contrary to a common but misconceived view of Locke’s aim in Essay II. xvii, that it is not so much the Cartesian ‘substantiation’ of the self that Locke is arguing against, but rather its disembodiment.

This chapter explores the UWC strike of May 1974 through the prism of playwright Stewart Parker. A native of East Belfast, Parker experimented with the dramatic form at the same time as structuring his work around the politics, divisions, and contradictions of his own community. The strike led to the destruction of the Sunningdale power-sharing Executive, though this was as much an expression of working-class Protestant power as an assault on the concept of nationalists (and Catholics) in power. This connectedly takes in Loyalist prisoners who began swelling the jails, a familiar academic concentration but seldom addressed through a cultural prism. Martin Lynch’s Chronicles of Long Kesh (2009) tackles the experience via a contested portrayal of Loyalist prisoners. The chapter ends with a return to Stewart Parker’s capacious and self-critical take on Ulster Protestant identity.

This book investigates how slaves experienced illness and the practice of medicine, as well as the ways in which physicians sought to understand race and sex, in the antebellum South. It shows that doctors who tried to define health and sickness for men and women, black and white, also had to contend with the realities of a slaveholding society. Slaveholders often defined slaves as healthy enough to work when the slaves considered themselves to be sick. At the same time, slaveholders wanted to protect their financial investment in the bodies of slaves and so had incentive to provide medical care for them. Slaves had their own beliefs about bodily differences and the causes of sickness as well as how to cure them, but their beliefs were seldom validated or their practices respected by slaveholders and doctors. In order to elucidate medical and lay perspectives on the political body in the antebellum old South, the book draws on evidence from a variety of sources, including medical journals and texts, physicians' diaries, and slave narratives and folklore for slaves.

Our nation’s population of culturally diverse students continues to rise. Among this group are many whose intellect and creativity are often masked by behaviors often seen by classroom teachers as a deficit or in such need of correction that the same student’s gifts are seldom given any attention and therefore, go under-developed. Teachers with broader cultural experience, training, and openness to diverse expressions of intelligence and creativity tend to fare better when working with diverse learners and are able to capitalize on their strengths, despite specific disabling conditions. The challenges of being a culturally diverse learner with high potential and identifiable disabling conditions are complex and often troubling to students, their parents, and teachers. This newly conceptualized 3e status presents a quagmire of conditions requiring that educators view these students through a different set of lenses and utilize a more creative tool box of strategies to bring out the best in these often overlooked and misdiagnosed learners. This chapter will explore the challenges, provide real-life cases, and offer unique, but practical strategies matched to student traits. Recommendations will also be offered for parents and family members to enhance their role as advocates for their uniquely exceptional children.

Crafting Masculine Selves represents a journey into the culture and psychological dynamics of a select group of Afghan Pashtun men. The book is based on eighteen months of fieldwork in a volatile area of Afghanistan, adjoining the border with Pakistan, carried out between 2009 and 2013. In addition to participant observation, the author employed a person-centered ethnographic methodology, wherein he conducted long-term, one-on-one interview sessions with four male individuals, and analyzed four additional life trajectories. The book unveils and chronicles how the creation and use of multiple subjectivities, and the unconscious, dissociative interplay that the individual maintains between them, is one of the “stratagems” with which individuals manage to make sense of what happens to them in real life, and to pragmatically inhabit personal circumstances that are often marred by conflict and violence, both at the interpersonal and at the political level. The main cultural thread the book investigates is that of masculinity, a crucial idiom in a very androcentric Pashtun society. Virtually all the interlocutors the book presents have to navigate deep private conflicts and contradictions related to how society expects them to be appropriate, proper men, against the backdrop of a sociopolitical Afghan context heavily impacted by almost forty years of uninterrupted war. Feeling constrained by the strict norms about a severe and honor-bound masculinity in a quickly changing Afghanistan, but equally striving to be culturally validated by their own peers, these men struggle to create and publicly legitimize their own, idiosyncratic way of being appropriate men. While they suffer at times the stern rebuke of their social environment, all the same they represent the seeds for a change of those very cultural norms.

Water, not temperature, governs life in West Africa, and the region is both temporally and spatially greatly affected by rainfall variability. Recent rainfall anomalies, for example, have greatly reduced crop productivity in the Sahel area. Rainfall indices from recent centuries show that multidecadal droughts reoccur and, furthermore, that interannual rainfall variations are high in West Africa. Current knowledge of historical rainfall patterns is, however, fairly limited. A detailed rainfall chronology of West Africa is currently only available from the beginning of the 19th century. For the 18th century and earlier, the records are still sporadic, and an interannual rainfall chronology has so far only been obtained for parts of the Guinea Coast. Thus, there is a need to extend the rainfall record to fully understand past precipitation changes in West Africa.The main challenge when investigating historical rainfall variability in West Africa is the scarcity of detailed and continuous data. Readily available meteorological data barely covers the last century, whereas in Europe and the United States for example, the data sometimes extend back two or more centuries. Data availability strongly correlates with the historical development of West Africa. The strong oral traditions that prevailed in the pre-literate societies meant that only some of the region’s history was recorded in writing before the arrival of the Europeans in the 16th century. From the 19th century onwards, there are, therefore, three types of documents available, and they are closely linked to the colonization of West Africa. These are: official records started by the colonial governments continuing to modern day; regular reporting stations started by the colonial powers; and finally, temporary nongovernmental observations of various kinds. For earlier periods, the researcher depends on noninstrumental observations found in letters, reports, or travel journals made by European slave traders, adventurers, and explorers. Spatially, these documents are confined to the coastal areas, as Europeans seldom ventured inland before the mid-1800s. Thus, the inland regions are generally poorly represented. Arabic chronicles from the Sahel provide the only source of information, but as historical documents, they include several spatiotemporal uncertainties. Climate researchers often complement historical data with proxy-data from nature’s own archives. However, the West African environment is restrictive. Reliable proxy-data, such as tree-rings, cannot be exploited effectively. Tropical trees have different growth patterns than trees in temperate regions and do not generate growth rings in the same manner. Sediment cores from Lake Bosumtwi in Ghana have provided, so far, the best centennial overview when it comes to understanding precipitation patterns during recent centuries. These reveal that there have been considerable changes in historical rainfall patterns—West Africa may have been even drier than it is today.