Peggy Cooper Davis is the John S.R. Shad Professor of Lawyering and Ethics at New York University. --

This book is a collection of chapters on happiness and well-being. It includes contributions from scientists from all over the world, who present different, multifaceted, dialectically open perspectives and sensitivities regarding happiness. The authors discuss happiness and well-being from biological, biopsychosocial, anthropological, and philosophical points of view.

For many therapists it has replaced previous action terms such as acting in and acting out. Something new has been captured by this concept: a recognition of a process that may involve words but goes beyond words. For some, enactment addresses a continuous undercurrent in the interaction between patient and therapist in the realm of intersubjectivity. Others ask whether this concept adds either clarity or a new perspective to the clinical situation. This volume addresses the questions: Does the current focus on enactments entail a shift in our model of therapeutic change? Are enactments essential? Can they be dangerous, and if so, under what circumstances? Enactment is essential reading for all psychotherapists.

Tracing embodied transformation in the context of Gaga, the Israeli dance improvisation practice, this book demystifies what Lina Aschenbrenner coins as “neo-spiritual aesthetics.” This book takes the reader on an analytical journey through a Gaga class, outlining the effective aesthetics of Gaga as an example for the broader field of neo-spiritualities. It distinguishes a threefold effect of Gaga practice-from a momentary extraordinary experience, to a lasting therapeutic effect, and finally Gaga's worldview potential. It situates the effect in an assemblage of interrelating aesthetics of environment, movement, and bodies. The book shows why seemingly leisure time activities such as Gaga form fruitful research objects to an academic study of religion and opens up research on neo-spiritual practices. In understanding the sensory effect of practice and its cultural and social implications, the book follows an Aesthetics of Religion approach. It departs from the idea that cognition is embodied and that the body is thus central to understanding cultural and social phenomena. Drawing upon a wide array of data gathered in the context of Gaga at the Suzanne Dellal Center in Tel Aviv, the book weaves together different methods of discourse, ritual, movement, body knowledge, and narrative analysis, while acknowledging insights from neuroscience and cognitive science.

How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Editor adrienne maree brown finds the answer in something she calls "Pleasure Activism," a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, including Audre Lourde's invitation to use the erotic as power and Toni Cade Bambara's exhortation that we make the revolution irresistible, the contributors to this volume take up the challenge to rethink the ground rules of activism. Writers including Cara Page of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation For Justice, Sonya Renee Taylor, founder of This Body Is Not an Apology, and author Alexis Pauline Gumbs cover a wide array of subjects—from sex work to climate change, from race and gender to sex and drugs—they create new narratives about how politics can feel good and how what feels good always has a complex politics of its own. Building on the success of her popular Emergent Strategy, brown launches a new series of the same name with this volume, bringing readers books that explore experimental, expansive, and innovative ways to meet the challenges that face our world today. Books that find the opportunity in every crisis!

A compelling new account of Wollstonecraft as incisive critic of the material, moral, and psychological conditions of commercial modernity.