Contemporary discussions on nonfiction are often riddled with questions about the boundaries between truth and memory, honesty and artifice, facts and lies. Just how much truth is in nonfiction? How much is a lie? Blurring the Boundaries sets out to answer such questions while simultaneously exploring the limits of the form. This collection features twenty genre-bending essays from today's most renowned teachers and writers--including original work from Michael Martone, Marcia Aldrich, Dinty W. Moore, Lia Purpura, and Robin Hemley, among others. These essays experiment with structure, style, and subject matter, and each is accompanied by the writer's personal reflection on the work itself, illuminating his or her struggles along the way. As these innovative writers stretch the limits of genre, they take us with them, offering readers a front-row seat to an ever-evolving form. Readers also receive a practical approach to craft thanks to the unique writing exercises provided by the writers themselves. Part groundbreaking nonfiction collection, part writing reference, Blurring the Boundaries serves as the ideal book for literary lovers and practitioners of the craft.

This book communicates the power and importance of sociological thinking to major, worldwide trends.

Far from being the latest movement or a new development in contemporary art, installation art, one could argue, is only the most recent manifestation of the oldest tradition in art, going as far back as the prehistoric paintings on cave walls at Lascaux. Fundamental to this work are its habitation and incorporation of a physical site, a connection to real conditions - be they visual, historical, or social - and often, a bridging of traditional art boundaries. The aesthetic power of installation art does not reside in the singular, commodified object but rather in the artwork's ability to become, not merely represent, the continuum of real experience. Blurring the Boundaries examines the subject of installation art through the permanent collection and exhibition record of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, an institution with a unique heritage in support of such art dating back to the 1960s.

Blurred Boundaries explores decisive moments when the traditional boundaries of fiction/nonfiction, truth and falsehood blur. Nichols argues that a history of social representation in film, television and video requires an understanding of the fate of both contemporary and older work. Traditionally, film history and cultural studies sought to place films in a historical context. Nichols proposes a new goal: to examine how specific works, old and new, promote or suppress a sense of historical consciousness. Examining work from Eisenstein's Strike to the Rodney King videotape, Nichols interrelates issues of formal structure, viewer response and historical consciousness. Simultaneously, Blurred Boundaries radically alters the interpretive frameworks offered by neo-formalism and psychoanalysis: Comprehension itself becomes a social act of transformative understanding rather than an abstract mental process while the use of psychoanalytic terms like desire, lack, or paranoia to make social points metaphorically yields to a vocabulary designed expressly for historical interpretation such as project, intentionality and the social imaginary. An important departure from prevailing trends in many fields, Blurred Boundaries offers new directions for the study of visual culture.

Examines the overlap and blurring of boundaries among humans, animals, and machines.

In Blurring Boundaries: Human Security and Forced Migration scholars from law and social sciences offer a fresh view on the major issues of forced migration through the lens of human security. Although much scholarship engages with forced migration and human security independently, they have hardly been weaved together in a comprehensive manner. The contributions cover the issues of refugee law, maritime migration, human smuggling and trafficking and environmental migration. Blurring Boundaries critically engages boundaries produced in the law with the main ideas of human security, thus providing a much-needed novel vocabulary for a critical discourse in forced migration studies.

First published in 1999, this volume examines new forms of cultural diversity which result from migration and globalization. Historically, most liberal democracies have developed on the basis of national cultures – either a single one, or a dominant one, or a federation of several ones. However, political and economic developments have upset traditional patterns and have blurred established boundaries. Ongoing immigration from diverse origins has inserted new ethnic minorities into formerly homogenous populations. Democratic liberties and rights provided opportunities for old and new marginalized minorities to resist assimilation and to assert identities. The resulting pattern of multiculturalism is different from earlier ones. Often cultural boundaries are neither clearly defined nor do they simply dissolve by assimilation into a dominant group – they have become fuzzy and a constant source of real or imagined hostility and anxiety. A proliferation of mixed identities goes together with stronger claims for cultural rights and escalating hostilities between ethnic minorities and national majorities. In many countries multiculturalism is today perceived as a challenge rather than as an enrichment. The book focuses on the question how institution and policies of liberal democracies can cope with these trends. The book addresses two tasks: 1) To compare different national contexts and types of ethnic groups (immigrant and indigenous, linguistic and religious minorities) and to discuss how policies of multicultural integration have to be adapted in order to cope with such differences. 2) To evaluate the impact of common rends of globalization which link societies and encourage convergence between national models of multicultural integration.

Why do poets write about animals? What can poetry do for animals and what can animals do for poetry? In some cases, poetry inscribes meaning on animals, turning them into symbols or caricatures and bringing them into the confines of human culture. It also reveals and revels in the complexity of animals. Poetry, through its great variety and its inherently experimental nature, has embraced the multifaceted nature of animals to cross, blur, and reimagine the boundaries between human and animal. In Poetry and Animals, Onno Oerlemans explores a broad range of English-language poetry about animals from the Middle Ages to the contemporary world. He presents a taxonomy of kinds of animal poems, breaking down the categories and binary oppositions at the root of human thinking about animals. The book considers several different types of poetry: allegorical poems, poems about “the animal” broadly conceived, poems about species of animal, poems about individual animals or the animal as individual, and poems about hybrids and hybridity. Through careful readings of dozens of poems that reveal generous and often sympathetic approaches to recognizing and valuing animals’ difference and similarity, Oerlemans demonstrates how the forms and modes of poetry can sensitize us to the moral standing of animals and give us new ways to think through the problems of the human-animal divide.

Global social work: crossing borders, blurring boundaries is a collection of ideas, debates and reflections on key issues concerning social work as a global profession, such as its theory, its curricula, its practice, its professional identity; its concern with human rights and social activism, and its future directions. Apart from emphasising the complexities of working and talking about social work across borders and cultures, the volume focuses on the curricula of social work programs from as many regions as possible to showcase what is being taught in various cultural, sociopolitical and regional contexts. Exploring the similarities and differences in social work education across many countries of the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Pacific, the book provides a reference point for moving the current social work discourse towards understanding the local and global context in its broader significance.

Blurred Borders