front cover of The Magic Key
The Magic Key
The Educational Journey of Mexican Americans from K-12 to College and Beyond
Edited by Ruth Enid Zambrana and Sylvia Hurtado
University of Texas Press, 2015

Mexican Americans comprise the largest subgroup of Latina/os, and their path to education can be a difficult one. Yet just as this group is often marginalized, so are their stories, and relatively few studies have chronicled the educational trajectory of Mexican American men and women. In this interdisciplinary collection, editors Zambrana and Hurtado have brought together research studies that reveal new ways to understand how and why members of this subgroup have succeeded and how the facilitators of success in higher education have changed or remained the same.

The Magic Key’s four sections explain the context of Mexican American higher education issues, provide conceptual understandings, explore contemporary college experiences, and offer implications for educational policy and future practices. Using historical and contemporary data as well as new conceptual apparatuses, the authors in this collection create a comparative, nuanced approach that brings Mexican Americans’ lived experiences into the dominant discourse of social science and education. This diverse set of studies presents both quantitative and qualitative data by gender to examine trends of generations of Mexican American college students, provides information on perceptions of welcoming university climates, and proffers insights on emergent issues in the field of higher education for this population. Professors and students across disciplines will find this volume indispensable for its insights on the Mexican American educational experience, both past and present.

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Making It Up Together
The Art of Collective Improvisation in Balinese Music and Beyond
Leslie A. Tilley
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Most studies of musical improvisation focus on individual musicians. But that is not the whole story. From jazz to flamenco, Shona mbira to Javanese gamelan, improvised practices thrive on group creativity, relying on the close interaction of multiple simultaneously improvising performers. In Making It Up Together, Leslie A. Tilley explores the practice of collective musical improvisation cross-culturally, making a case for placing collectivity at the center of improvisation discourse and advocating ethnographically informed music analysis as a powerful tool for investigating improvisational processes.

Through two contrasting Balinese case studies—of the reyong gong chime’s melodic norot practice and the interlocking drumming tradition kendang arja—Tilley proposes and tests analytical frameworks for examining collectively improvised performance. At the micro-level, Tilley’s analyses offer insight into the note-by-note decisions of improvising performers; at the macro-level, they illuminate larger musical, discursive, structural, and cultural factors shaping those decisions. This multi-tiered inquiry reveals that unpacking how performers play and imagine as a collective is crucial to understanding improvisation and demonstrates how music analysis can elucidate these complex musical and interactional relationships.

Highlighting connections with diverse genres from various music cultures, Tilley’s examinations of collective improvisation also suggest rich potential for cross-genre exploration. The surrounding discussions point to larger theories of communication and interaction, creativity and cognition that will be of interest to a range of readers—from ethnomusicologists and music theorists to cognitive psychologists, jazz studies scholars, and improvising performers. Setting new parameters for the study of improvisation, Making It Up Together opens up fresh possibilities for understanding the creative process, in music and beyond.
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Making Sense of the Americas
How Protest Related to America in the 1980s and Beyond
Edited by Jan Hansen, Christian Helm, and Frank Reichherzer
Campus Verlag, 2015
From anti-Reagan riots in West Berlin to pictures of revolutionary Nicaragua, it is impossible to examine global social protest movements of the 1970s and ’80s without addressing how these movements imagined the Americas. By examining historical representations of the United States and Latin America among Western European protesters and how these symbols were utilized by these movements, this book offers a fresh and compelling look at protest in the second half of the twentieth century. Contributions focus primarily on the anti-Euromissile peace protests and the solidarity movement with Latin America to shed light both on how European protestors built networks with the Americas and how American activists conceived of Europe and European protest. Looking east to west, north to south, this book reveals that we cannot understand the groundswell of 1980s protest movements in Europe without unraveling European representations of the Americas.
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Making the Scene in the Garden State
Popular Music in New Jersey from Edison to Springsteen and Beyond
Dewar MacLeod
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Making the Scene in the Garden State explores New Jersey’s rich musical heritage through stories about the musicians, listeners and fans who came together to create sounds from across the American popular music spectrum. The book includes chapters on the beginnings of musical recording in Thomas Edison’s factories in West Orange; early recording and the invention of the Victrola at Victor Records’ Camden complex; Rudy Van Gelder’s recording studios (for Blue Note, Prestige, and other jazz labels) in Hackensack and Englewood Cliffs; Zacherley and the afterschool dance television show Disc-o-Teen, broadcast from Newark in the 1960s; Bruce Springsteen’s early years on the Jersey Shore at the Upstage Club in Asbury Park; and, the 1980s indie rock scene centered at Maxwell’s in Hoboken. Concluding with a foray into the thriving local music scenes of today, the book examines the sounds, sights and textures of the locales where New Jerseyans have gathered to rock, bop, and boogie.
 
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front cover of Mixed-Member Electoral Systems in Constitutional Context
Mixed-Member Electoral Systems in Constitutional Context
Taiwan, Japan, and Beyond
Edited by Nathan F. Batto, Chi Huang, Alexander C. Tan, and Gary W. Cox
University of Michigan Press, 2016
Reformers have promoted mixed-member electoral systems as the “best of both worlds.” In this volume, internationally recognized political scientists evaluate the ways in which the introduction of a mixed-member electoral system affects the configuration of political parties. The contributors examine several political phenomena, including cabinet post allocation, nominations, preelectoral coalitions, split-ticket voting, and the size of party systems and faction systems. Significantly, they also consider various ways in which the constitutional system—especially whether the head of government is elected directly or indirectly—can modify the incentives created by the electoral system.  

The findings presented here demonstrate that the success of electoral reform depends not only on the specification of new electoral rules per se but also on the political context—and especially the constitutional framework—within which such rules are embedded.

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front cover of The Mystery of Death and Beyond
The Mystery of Death and Beyond
Kenneth Baker, S.J.
St. Augustine's Press, 2016
The purpose of this little book is to answer certain questions that many people have about the nature of death. Most people feel that there is something wrong about death. We all want to live a happy life and we do not want to die. Life is experienced as something very good and we want to preserve it. But the reality is that man is by nature mortal, which means that he is destined to die sooner or later. The fact is that we begin to die the moment we are conceived in our mother’s womb.
     Man is unlike all other animals, because he has a soul endowed with intelligence and free will. Because man’s soul is spiritual, it is immortal. Death is the separation of that soul from the body; the body decays and returns to the dust from which it was taken, but the soul continues to live and is in the hands of God. But what happens to the soul after death? There are two possibilities—heaven or hell. We know from divine revelation and from the infallible teaching of the Church that the soul after death goes immediately to heaven (perhaps first for a time to purgatory to be totally cleansed and sanctified), or immediately to hell, a state or place of eternal misery.
     The next life is a life without time—it is a perpetual now, with no before and after. It has a beginning but not end. It is also unchangeable, that is, souls in heaven are there forever and they cannot lose it; souls in hell are there forever and they can never be freed from it.
     This is a very serious and certain reality for each one of us. The most important thing we will ever do is to die, and to die in the state of God’s grace so that we are his friends and will be admitted to his presence, which is what is meant by heaven. Therefore we must prepare ourselves to die in the grace of God, which is our ticket to heaven. We do that by doing God’s will for us, which means to keep his commandments, especially to love God above all things and practice love of neighbor.
     This short book will help people think about their death and how important it is for their permanent happiness. It will help them to arrange their life in such a way that they will live it as God wants them to live it and so ultimately obtain eternal life with God because: “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2:9).


 
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