Paid work is absolutely central to the culture and politics of capitalist societies, yet today’s work-centred world is becoming increasingly hostile to the human need for autonomy, spontaneity and community. The grim reality of a society in which some are overworked, whilst others are condemned to intermittent work and unemployment, is progressively more difficult to tolerate. In this thought-provoking book, David Frayne questions the central place of work in mainstream political visions of the future, laying bare the ways in which economic demands colonise our lives and priorities. Drawing on his original research into the lives of people who are actively resisting nine-to-five employment, Frayne asks what motivates these people to disconnect from work, whether or not their resistance is futile, and whether they might have the capacity to inspire an alternative form of development, based on a reduction and social redistribution of work. A crucial dissection of the work-centred nature of modern society and emerging resistance to it, The Refusal of Work is a bold call for a more humane and sustainable vision of social progress.

Annotation Kearney, a clinical child psychologist at the U. of Nevada, Las Vegas, has written his book mainly with the school psychologist in mind. The problem of school refusal is put into a context in initial chapters which give an overview of the historical literature on school refusal behavior and describe the characteristics of these youth, while also critiquing the classification strategies employed. After introducing a functional model, Kearney summarizes treatment strategies and discusses methods for prevention as well as the reality of extreme cases. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

In Refusal, her searing new collection of poetry, Jenny Molberg draws on elements of the uncanny—invented hospitals, the Demogorgon of Dungeons & Dragons, an Ophelia character who refuses suicide—to investigate trauma, addiction, and forces of oppression. Exposing the effects of widespread toxic misogyny, this confrontational volume examines societal, cultural, and personal gaslighting in situations of domestic abuse. As Molberg writes in “Loving Ophelia Is,” “love and hate simultaneously is the trick of abuse / and the trick of abuse is a vexation of the mind.” A sequence of epistolary poems looks to friendship as a safe haven from violent romantic relationships, while another series on a mother’s struggle with addiction captures the complicated nature of a parent-child relationship affected by alcoholism. Refusal seeks to break silences and to interrogate a cultural misogyny that weighs heavily on a woman’s position in the world.

A field guide to a nonfascist life at the end of the world as we know it A Guerrilla Guide to Refusal is an unexpected approach to philosophy from a guerrilla-logic point of view. Harnessing critical theory to creatively reimagine counterinsurgency, guerrilla warfare, and interventions beyond the political mainstream, it takes us on a journey through anarchist infowar, queer outlaws, and black insurgency—through a subterranean network of communiques, military documents, contemporary art, political slogans, adversarial blogs, and captive media. In doing so, it provides powerful new insight into contemporary political movements that pose no demands, refuse labels, and offer no solutions. Written to both inspire and provoke, A Guerrilla Guide to Refusal urges us to think through the refusal to participate in politics as usual. Author Andrew Culp demonstrates how evasion can combatively deny the existing order its power. Focusing on punk cinema, anarchist pamphlets, feminist art projects, hacker manifestos, and guerrilla manuals, he foregrounds invisibility as a novel force of disruption. He draws on concepts of criminality, fugitivity, and anonymity to bring a more nuanced understanding of how power makes things—and people—visible. The book’s unique format is that of a theoretical manual, comprising freestanding segments instead of blueprints. Poised to reach beyond the academy into activist circles, this potent theory-in-action intervention forces us to reconsider the terrain upon which our struggles against patriarchy, anti-Blackness, capitalism, and the state operate.

November 11, 2002: Grigori Perelman, a famous mathematician, brilliantly establishes his proof of the Poincaré Conjecture. A few years later, he is widely acclaimed for his research. However, he declines the prestigious Fields Medal and persists in not wanting to leave his native city of Saint Petersburg to attend the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid in 2006 where the medal is supposed to be awarded. John Ball, the President of the International Mathematical Union, decided to visit Russia in an attempt to convince Perelman to accept the Fields Medal. This book contains the story, part real, part fictional, of the exchanges between Ball and Perelman. We are immersed in the tormented mind of a person who prefers the simple and secluded life to the prestige of his discoveries. We already know the final outcome of the story, Perelman's perpetual refusal to be glorified by the public, and yet there is still much to learn from this character of astonishing complexity.

Set against the backdrop of the Obama presidency, Julian Randall's Refuse documents a young biracial man's journey through the mythos of Blackness, Latinidad, family, sexuality and a hostile American landscape. Mapping the relationship between father and son caught in a lineage of grief and inherited Black trauma, Randall conjures reflections from mythical figures such as Icarus, Narcissus and the absent Frank Ocean. Not merely a story of the wound but the salve, Refuse is a poetry debut that accepts that every song must end before walking confidently into the next music.

School refusal is a crippling condition in which children experience extreme anxiety or panic attacks when faced with everyday school life. This book aims to explore, raise awareness of the problem and provide plans and strategies for education, health and social care professionals for identifying and addressing this problem

An empirical investigation into the impact of immigration on institutions and prosperity.

John Rawls is widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work has permanently shaped the nature and terms of moral and political philosophy, deploying a robust and specialized vocabulary that reaches beyond philosophy to political science, economics, sociology, and law. This volume is a complete and accessible guide to Rawls' vocabulary, with over 200 alphabetical encyclopaedic entries written by the world's leading Rawls scholars. From 'basic structure' to 'burdened society', from 'Sidgwick' to 'strains of commitment', and from 'Nash point' to 'natural duties', the volume covers the entirety of Rawls' central ideas and terminology, with illuminating detail and careful cross-referencing. It will be an essential resource for students and scholars of Rawls, as well as for other readers in political philosophy, ethics, political science, sociology, international relations and law.

An acclaimed political theorist offers a fresh, interdisciplinary analysis of the politics of refusal, highlighting the promise of a feminist politics that does not simply withdraw from the status quo but also transforms it. The Bacchae, Euripides’s fifth-century tragedy, famously depicts the wine god Dionysus and the women who follow him as indolent, drunken, mad. But Bonnie Honig sees the women differently. They reject work, not out of laziness, but because they have had enough of women’s routine obedience. Later they escape prison, leave the city of Thebes, explore alternative lifestyles, kill the king, and then return to claim the city. Their “arc of refusal,” Honig argues, can inspire a new feminist politics of refusal. Refusal, the withdrawal from unjust political and economic systems, is a key theme in political philosophy. Its best-known literary avatar is Herman Melville’s Bartleby, whose response to every request is, “I prefer not to.” A feminist politics of refusal, by contrast, cannot simply decline to participate in the machinations of power. Honig argues that a feminist refusal aims at transformation and, ultimately, self-governance. Withdrawal is a first step, not the end game. Rethinking the concepts of refusal in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Adriana Cavarero, and Saidiya Hartman, Honig places collective efforts toward self-governance at refusal’s core and, in doing so, invigorates discourse on civil and uncivil disobedience. She seeks new protagonists in film, art, and in historical and fictional figures including Sophocles’s Antigone, Ovid’s Procne, Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna, and Muhammad Ali. Rather than decline the corruptions of politics, these agents of refusal join the women of Thebes first in saying no and then in risking to undertake transformative action.