"The Shape Shifters" offers a unique set of new tools keeping readers ahead of fast-moving curves. The simple analytical and "teaching tools" in this book can make any business nimbler and more decisive. The author provides hundreds of examples of how companies have redefined the shapes of their businesses, "shape shifting" faster and more often to match the changing shape of customer demands.

Shape Shifters presents a wide-ranging array of essays that examine peoples of mixed racial identity. Moving beyond the static “either/or” categories of racial identification found within typical insular conversations about mixed-race peoples, Shape Shifters explores these mixed-race identities as fluid, ambiguous, contingent, multiple, and malleable. This volume expands our understandings of how individuals and ethnic groups identify themselves within their own sociohistorical contexts. The essays in Shape Shifters explore different historical eras and reach across the globe, from the Roman and Chinese borderlands of classical antiquity to medieval Eurasian shape shifters, the Native peoples of the missions of Spanish California, and racial shape shifting among African Americans in the post–civil rights era. At different times in their lives or over generations in their families, racial shape shifters have moved from one social context to another. And as new social contexts were imposed on them, identities have even changed from one group to another. This is not racial, ethnic, or religious imposture. It is simply the way that people’s lives unfold in fluid sociohistorical circumstances. With contributions by Ryan Abrecht, George J. Sánchez, Laura Moore, and Margaret Hunter, among others, Shape Shifters explores the forces of migration, borderlands, trade, warfare, occupation, colonial imposition, and the creation and dissolution of states and empires to highlight the historically contingent basis of identification among mixed-race peoples across time and space.

"Describes the ways in which animals change their appearance to avoid predators or attract mates"--

An exploration of the anthropogenic landscapes of Lucca, Italy, and how its people understand social and environmental change through cultivation In Italy and around the Mediterranean, almost every stone, every tree, and every hillside show traces of human activities. Situating climate change within the context of the Anthropocene, Andrew Mathews investigates how people in Lucca, Italy, make sense of social and environmental change by caring for the morphologies of trees and landscapes. He analyzes how people encounter climate change, not by thinking and talking about climate, but by caring for the environments around them. Maintaining landscape stability by caring for the forms of trees, rivers, and hillsides is a way that people link their experiences to the past and to larger scale political questions. The human-transformed landscapes of Italy are a harbinger of the experiences that all of us are likely to face, and addressing these disasters will call upon all of us to think about the human and natural histories of the landscapes we live in.

Examines the history of werewolf lore, famous incidents, and possible explanations.

For thousands of years, people have believed that certain humans have the ability to turn into animals, particularly wolves. This book describes all kinds of shape-shifters, from the Japanese kitsune to the Irish selkies. The history of these fascinating characters is accompanied by vivid computer-generated illustrations that will capture the imagination and spark the curiosity of young readers.

There is something about a shapeshifter—a person who can transform into an animal—that captures our imagination; that causes us to want to howl at the moon, or flit through the night like a bat. Werewolves, vampires, demons, and other weird creatures appeal to our animal nature, our “dark side,” our desire to break free of the bonds of society and proper behavior. Real or imaginary, shapeshifters lurk deep in our psyches and remain formidable cultural icons. The myths, magic, and meaning surrounding shapeshifters are brought vividly to life in John B. Kachuba’s compelling and original cultural history. Rituals in early cultures worldwide seemingly allowed shamans, sorcerers, witches, and wizards to transform at will into animals and back again. Today, there are millions of people who believe that shapeshifters walk among us and may even be world leaders. Featuring a fantastic and ghoulish array of examples from history, literature, film, TV, and computer games, Shapeshifters explores our secret desire to become something other than human.

Explores the folklore and facts connected with vampires, zombies, and shape-shifters such as werewolves.

In recent years, shapeshifting characters in literature, film and television have been on the rise. This has followed the increased use of such characters as metaphors, with novelists and critics identifying specific meanings and topics behind them. This book aims to unravel the shapeshifting trope. Rather than pursue a case-based study, the works are grouped around specific themes--adolescence, gender, sexuality, race, disability, addiction, and spirituality--that are explored through the metaphor of shapeshifting. Because of the transformative possibilities of this metaphor and its flexibility, the shapeshifter has the potential to change how we see our world. With coverage of iconic fantasy texts and a focus on current works, the book engages with the shapeshifting figure in popular culture from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

In Shapeshifters Aimee Meredith Cox explores how young Black women in a Detroit homeless shelter contest stereotypes, critique their status as partial citizens, and negotiate poverty, racism, and gender violence to create and imagine lives for themselves. Based on eight years of fieldwork at the Fresh Start shelter, Cox shows how the shelter's residents—who range in age from fifteen to twenty-two—employ strategic methods she characterizes as choreography to disrupt the social hierarchies and prescriptive narratives that work to marginalize them. Among these are dance and poetry, which residents learn in shelter workshops. These outlets for performance and self-expression, Cox shows, are key to the residents exercising their agency, while their creation of alternative family structures demands a rethinking of notions of care, protection, and love. Cox also uses these young women's experiences to tell larger stories: of Detroit's history, the Great Migration, deindustrialization, the politics of respectability, and the construction of Black girls and women as social problems. With Shapeshifters Cox gives a voice to young Black women who find creative and non-normative solutions to the problems that come with being young, Black, and female in America.