“A relevant book for our times. ... Educational and inspiring." —Readers' Favorite five-star review At its best, the college experience can be invaluable for doing the most important work of all—finding your purpose. At its worst, it can be an expensive distraction that indoctrinates you into an instant-gratification culture and prevents you from building a meaningful base not just for your career but for your life. Drawing upon the great thinkers of contemporary philosophy and psychology, this book reveals a revolutionary way to prepare for navigating the complexities and potential pitfalls of college, including: • How to look past the limited view of gifted but specialized academics • How to select courses that will help you get interviews with potential employers • How to develop a meaningful social and professional network, including outside the college community • How to take full advantage of college facilities and programs—including some you may not even be aware of Robert Pirsig’s classic book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance used metaphysical imagery to reveal a more holistic way to think about the world and our place in it. In that tradition, Zen and the Art of Navigating College is a first-of-its-kind handbook for being prepared to get what you really NEED from the college experience—a path to discovering a greater purpose and the tools to achieve it.

This study develops the important work carried out on American literature through the frameworks of transnational, transatlantic, and trans-local studies to ask what happens when these same aspects become intrinsic to the critical narrative. Much cultural criticism since the 1990s has sought to displace perceptions of American exceptionalism with broader notions of Atlanticism, transnationalism, world-system, and trans-localism as each has redefined the US and the world more generally. This collection shows how the remapping of America in terms of global networks, and as a set of particular localities, or even glocalities, now plays out in Americanist scholarship, reflecting on the critical consequences of the spatial turn in American literary and cultural studies. Spanning twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry, fiction, memoir, visual art, publishing, and television, and locating the US in Caribbean, African, Asian, European, and other contexts, this volume argues for a re-modelling of American-ness with the transnational as part of its innate rhetoric. It includes discussions of travel, migration, disease, media, globalization, and countless other examples of inflowing. Essays focus on subjects tracing the contemporary contours of the transnational, such as the role of the US in the rise of the global novel, the impact of Caribbean history on American thought (and vice versa), transatlantic cultural and philosophical genealogies and correspondences, and the exchanges between the poetics of American space and those of other world spaces. Asking questions about the way the American eye has traversed and consumed the objects and cultures of the world, but how that world is resistant, this volume will make an important contribution to American and Transatlantic literary studies.

Unwell Writing Centers focuses on the inroads the wellness industry has made into higher education. Following graduate and undergraduate writing tutors during a particularly stressful period (2016–2019), Genie Nicole Giaimo examines how top-down and bottom-up wellness interventions are received and taken up by workers. Engaging sociocultural research on how workers react to and experience workplace conflict, Giaimo demonstrates the kinds of interventions welcomed by workers as well as those that fall flat, including the “easy” fixes to workplace issues that institutions provide in lieu of meaningful and community-based support. The book is broken into sections based on journeying: searching for wellness, finding wellness, and imagining a “well” future that includes a sustainable model of writing center work. Each chapter begins with a personal narrative about wellness issues in writing centers, including the author’s experiences in and responses to local emergencies. She shares findings from a longitudinal assessment study on non-institutional interventions in writing centers and provides resources for administrators to create more ethical "well" writing centers. The book also includes an appendix of training documents, emergency planning documents, and several wellness-specific interventions developed from anti-racist, anti-neoliberal, and organizational theories. Establishing the need for a field-specific response to the austerity-minded eruption of wellness-focused interventions in higher education, Unwell Writing Centers is a critical text for graduate students and new directors that can easily be applied in workplaces in and outside of higher education.

Co-written by a professor and 10 students, this book explores their attempts to come to grips with fundamental issues related to writing narrative accounts purporting to represent aspects of people's lives. The fundamental project, around which their explorations in writing textual accounts turned, derived from the editor's initial ethnographic question: "Tell me about the [previous] class we did together?" This proved to be a particularly rich exercise, bringing into the arena all of the problems related to choice of data, analysis of data, the structure of the account, the stance of the author, tense, and case, the adequacy of the account, and more. As participants shared versions of their accounts and struggled to analyze the wealth of data they had accumulated in the previous classes -- the products of in-class practice of observation and interview -- they became aware of the ephemeral nature of narrative accounts. Reality, as written in textual form, cannot capture the immense depth, breadth, and complexity of an actual lived experience and can only be an incomplete representation that derives from the interpretive imagination of the author. The final chapter results from a number of discussions during which each contributing author briefly revisited the text and -- through dialogue with others and/or the editor -- identified the elements that would provide an overall framework that represents "the big message" of the book. In this way, the contributors attempted to provide a conceptual context that would indicate ways in which their private experiences could be seen to be relevant to the broader public arenas in which education and research is engaged. In its entirety, the book presents an interpretive study of teaching and learning. It provides a multi-voiced account that reveals how problematic, turning-point experiences in a university class are perceived, organized, constructed, and given meaning by a group of interacting individuals.

As the racial and ethnic landscape of the United States shifts, interracial communication plays an increasingly crucial role. The sociopolitical climate has impacted identities, relationships, media, and organizations—challenging the possibility of having transformative engagement about race. Power differences affected by race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, ability, age, and geography are sometimes invisible. Competent interracial communication is key to alleviating polarized interactions and addressing the unequal treatment of microcultures. Part I of the book provides essential background, including the history of race, the importance of communication, the development and intersectionality of racial and ethnic identities, and models and theories of interracial communication. Part II applies this information to communication practices in specific, everyday contexts: global racial hierarchies and colorism, friendships/ romantic relationships, communication in the workplace, interracial conflict, and race and ethnicity in the media. The concluding chapter outlines pathways to meaningful change and invites readers to become active participants in dialogue to facilitate working through differences. The authors offer comprehensive, readable, and insightful coverage of pressing issues. They focus on communication as vital to removing barriers to understanding. Becoming proactive in eliminating racism on a personal level is a step toward the macrolevel changes required to dismantle systemic racism. The fourth edition is a socially relevant resource for facilitating interracial dialogue to create a positive climate to work together to achieve social justice.

You are girlish, our images tell us. You are plastic. Girlhood and the Plastic Image explains how, revealing the increasing girlishness of contemporary media. The figure of the girl has long been prized for its mutability, for the assumed instability and flexibility of the not-yet-woman. The plasticity of girlish identity has met its match in the plastic world of digital art and cinema. A richly satisfying interdisciplinary study showing girlish transformation to be a widespread condition of mediation, Girlhood and the Plastic Image explores how and why our images promise us the adaptability of youth. This original and engaging study will appeal to a broad interdisciplinary audience including scholars of media studies, film studies, art history, and women's studies.

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