The history and meaning of one of the most controversial words in American English

Few words in English are as charged as "nigga" and "n*gger." While the slur "n*gger" is universally recognized as offensive, fierce debates continue over the use of "nigga"-who can say it, what it means, and whether it has been reclaimed as a term of endearment among Black people. Are these two words or one word with two pronunciations, and do they have different meanings?

Wassup, My Nigga is the first book written by an African American linguist to explore the word's origin, history, and usage. Drawing on sources across time, from nineteenth-century slave narratives and ex-slave recordings to contemporary conversations on social media, the book reveals how the word's meanings vary according to context and across racial groups. It challenges myths about reclamation, explains why multiple pronunciations exist, and examines what the evidence really shows about how-and whether-meanings have changed over time.

By presenting the discussion within the context of African American English, Wassup, My Nigga sheds new light on one of the most controversial words in American English and what it reveals about language, race, and identity.

Challenging racism, reshaping sexuality, and reimagining belonging across two centuriesFor generations, queer and trans Asian Americans have shaped the history of the United States-often in ways overlooked or erased from the historical record. Breathing Fire brings these lives and struggles into focus, offering a sweeping survey of queer Asian American history from the nineteenth century to the present. Through vivid stories of activists, artists, and ordinary individuals, Amy Sueyoshi reveals how queer Asian Americans forged communities, fought for LGBTQ rights, and challenged the boundaries of belonging.

Drawing on archival sources, oral histories, and a wide body of scholarship, Sueyoshi offers an introductory text that traces how queer Asians in America navigated shifting landscapes of immigration restriction, racial discrimination, and sexual regulation. Early immigrants from Asia arrived with cultural traditions that often accommodated diverse sexualities and gender expressions, yet they encountered increasingly rigid moral codes in the United States. Across the twentieth century, many lived quietly under the radar, while others helped spark transformative movements for civil rights and gay liberation. They navigated anti-Asian sentiment, homophobia, transphobia, and sex negativity to assert their freedom to be queer, some more defiantly than others.

By placing queer Asian Americans within significant signposts in LGBTQ, Asian American, and US history, Breathing Fire highlights their intimate lives and connections as well as their perseverance in pursuing queer desires.

Writing groups often fly under the radar in academia, but they can make a big difference. Faculty are under constant pressure to publish while juggling teaching, research, and service. Add packed schedules and limited time, and writing can easily get sidelined-especially for women balancing work and family. Breaking Boundaries: How Writing Groups Fuel Women's Academic Success explores how writing groups offer support, structure, and community to help navigate these challenges.

Whether you're a grad student trying to finish a dissertation, a stuck faculty member, or someone newly tenured wondering what's next-you're in the right place. This book shares honest stories, insights, and encouragement from women who have found strength in writing together. Each chapter highlights real experiences with writing groups-what helped, what didn't, and how these groups shaped the authors' scholarly identities. They discuss topics such as overcoming imposter syndrome, access to writing resources, navigating the stress of tenure, making academic contributions outside traditional paths, and creating sustainable writing habits. The contributors come from diverse disciplines and deliver practical advice for making writing fit into a hectic academic life. Their message is clear: when scholars support each other in writing, they not only grow their own careers, but also become mentors, leaders, and role models in the academic world.

This groundbreaking study reveals a remarkable and largely unfamiliar dimension of Jewish history: the ways in which classical mythology became part of Jewish life and erudite culture in Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. From vibrant civic processions and rabbinic sermons to kabbalistic treatises, folk tales, and messianic heretical performances, figures such as Bacchus, Pan, the Sibyls, Amazons, and Prometheus entered the Jewish cultural landscape in surprising and illuminating ways. Tracing the Jewish encounter with classical myth through two waves, influenced by Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment critique, Maoz Kahana argues that these encounters were not superficial borrowings. Rather, classical myth served as a medium through which Jews reimagined their textual heritage and expanded the intellectual horizons of their tradition.

Kahana's work illuminates a previously unexplained boom of classical mythological elements in Jewish literature beginning in the early modern era, providing new insight into the intersection of Jewish, Christian humanist, and pagan traditions. In this new portrait of Jewish mysticism in early modernity, Kahana argues that kabbalistic thinkers, leaders, and ritualists can and should be explored within a wider cultural and intellectual landscape. Through vivid case studies, the book shows how Greek and Roman mythological materials opened new avenues for rethinking the distant past, ongoing tradition, revelation, hidden knowledge, and the nature of the self. Putting Nachman of Breslov in conversation with Giambattista Vico, this book offers a sweeping account of the creative Jewish engagement with classical mythology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.

This book traces the modern history of ineffability, the idea that mystical experience lies beyond the reach of language, across twentieth-century scholarship on mysticism. Moving from William James to W.T. Stace and beyond, it examines how theories of ineffability were shaped not only by philosophical commitments but also by rhetorical strategies and disciplinary politics within the academic study of religion. Through close readings of major figures including James, Underhill, Otto, Zaehner, Stace, Smith, Hick, Forman, d'Aquili, and Sells, the book uncovers a crucial historical shift: from early understandings of ineffability as relative, what cannot be fully but can still be partially expressed, to later claims that mystical experience or its source is absolutely ineffable, wholly beyond conceptual mediation. This "absolutization" of ineffability, the book argues, served to defend a perennialist vision of religion's universal core and to shield it from contextual critique. Concluding with a semiotic "meta-argument" against absolute ineffability, the study proposes that a theory of relative ineffability better accounts for both mystical discourse and ordinary experiences of the unsayable. In doing so, it reorients the study of mysticism toward a more nuanced understanding of how language, experience, and meaning continually shape one another. It is an important read in the study of mysticism.

Investigates how discourse spills from language to action, generating, obfuscating, and perpetuating violence while also offering the words, principles, and practices that may interrupt it.

We are continually catching up with and being caught by words, especially words that hurt. These collected essays probe the interaction of violence and words across time, place, and circumstance. Often cited as the core source of violence, religion's capacity for coordinating ideas, symbols, and groups has made it a potent force in the production and deflection of violence. Yet the production of the category "religion" has also contributed to violence; employed to surveille and subjugate targeted populations, "religion" enabled and conveyed colonial domination on a global scale. The claim that religion causes violence has therefore missed a fundamental insight: as a word, "religion" also acts in and on the world. Contributors thus ask: How does persecution become weaponized in and through language? Whose stories are told and who is allowed to speak them? And how do language, symbols, art, activism, and performance find ways to speak back, push back, and offer critique? Theorizing, historicizing, and addressing the violence of words and words of violence, "religion" emerges as critical theory and embodies the very practice of critique.

A sweeping history of how noncitizen students shaped U.S. universities

From colonial missionary schools to the globalized university of the twentieth century, U.S. higher education has long depended on students who were never meant to belong. Degrees of Empire tells the untold history of how noncitizen students - Indigenous youth, students from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, and others positioned outside the boundaries of citizenship - have been central to the making of American universities and the expansion of U.S. power.

Tracing the intertwined development of higher education, immigration law, and imperial governance from the seventeenth century through the mid-twentieth, Abigail Boggs shows how universities functioned as fundamental instruments of empire. Noncitizen students were recruited and educated under conditions of surveillance, restriction, and impermanence, trained to circulate knowledge, labor, and political ideals on behalf of the United States even as they were denied full political membership and exposed to constant threat of exclusion or deportation.

Drawing on archival records, immigration policy, institutional documents, and the writings of students themselves, Degrees of Empire demonstrates how universities helped produce racial hierarchies, manage populations, and naturalize liberal ideals of merit and mobility. By examining the figure of the noncitizen student genealogically across time, Boggs reveals a fundamental contradiction at the heart of U.S. higher education: institutions that present themselves as open and universal have long relied on selective inclusion structured by race, citizenship, and capital.

At a moment when immigration and higher education are once again sites of intense political struggle, this book offers a powerful rethinking of the American university-not as a neutral engine of opportunity, but as a central technology of empire and a contested space in which alternative futures may yet be imagined.

Artificial intelligence is driving the greatest transformation in human history. It changes everything. We must rethink, relearn our emotions, act anew-and learn anew. It is time for a new form of learning: learning that is as natural as breathing and helps us actively shape our future. It is time for a new pedagogy: future pedagogy.

In the face of increasing climate disruption, this book provides a design-centered investigation of how cities might adapt, recover, and prosper. It positions resilience not as a technical add-on, but as a fundamentally social, ecological, and spatial practice that must be embedded across scales, from materials and buildings to neighbourhoods, infrastructures, and urban systems.

The chapters show how climatic threats including heat, flooding, water scarcity, and catastrophic shocks are changing our conception of urban space in a variety of worldwide situations. The contributions demonstrate how nature-based solutions, water-sensitive planning, circular construction, and regenerative urbanism are now inextricably linked to resilient design. They also show how new technologies like geographic simulation, XR environments, and digital twins are increasing the designer's ability to foresee unpredictability and test flexible solutions before putting them into practice.

The main issue addressed is evident: urban development practice still has difficulty converting resilience concepts into spatial, material, and community-grounded design activity, even in the face of increased awareness of climate risk. In response, this book compiles experimental techniques, conceptual developments, and empirical research that show how resilience may be operationalized in actual projects and locations. It focuses on transferable tactics that can influence professional practice, education, and policy, such as regenerative neighbourhood models, nature-based drainage, climate-responsive public spaces, and circular recovery.

Resilient by Design ultimately argues that the future of cities depends on re-aligning ecological systems, technological innovation, and social inclusion through design thinking. It provides an interdisciplinary knowledge base and a forward-looking agenda for shaping climate-ready urban environments. The book is intended for researchers, urban designers, architects, planners, landscape architects, and policymakers engaged in climate-resilient and sustainable urban development.

This book is the result of five years' research into the transformative regeneration of East London's Docklands, driven by the London Docklands Development Corporation, established in 1981. Drawing heavily on original primary source research, it tells a story much repeated but previously only partially understood. The book sheds new light on the unlikely emergence of the Canary Wharf development, the local and national politics that enabled it, and the maverick individuals who made it happen. It argues that understanding why and how Canary Wharf and the wider Docklands regeneration came about is crucial for understanding how future regeneration projects may or may not succeed.

This volume presents a systematic exploration of science governance from a normative political theory perspective. It introduces a 'republican' governance model for science research and education, centered on universities, aligning with Karl Popper's concept of the 'open society' despite the elite nature of scientific expertise. This extensively revised 25th anniversary edition addresses the intensified tension noted in the original. As science's need to assert authority has grown with its deeper involvement in political, economic, and cultural spheres, a more educated public, often influenced by maverick scientists via social media, has increasingly challenged this authority. The Governance of Science anticipated several aspects of this issue, which are revisited here, considering the future of 'science republicanism' today. While specific arguments have evolved, the book's initial call for the 'secularization' of science remains pertinent.

This essential work collects Susan Taubes's philosophical and critical writings, establishing her as one of the most remarkable philosophical minds of the 20th century. At the centerpiece of the volume is Susan Taubes's dissertation on Simone Weil, "The Absent God", and also included are her previously published essays and reviews on Weil, Heidegger, Jean Genet and Albert Camus, as well as an unpublished fragment on Franz Kafka. Taken together, these rigorously philosophical works show Taubes to be a thinker preoccupied with seeking out a lexicon - of myth and symbol, image and narrative - by which to articulate the conundrum of how to live and die in a cosmos saturated with meaning but devoid of divinity. There has been a surge of interest in Taubes following the recent republication of her novels Divorcing and Lament for Julia. With an incisive introduction by Sarah Hammerschlag, this volume provides the necessary supplement to her fictional corpus, tracking Taubes's transformation from philosopher to novelist, while revealing Taubes to be not only an extraordinary literary voice but a profound scholarly one as well.

This book investigates the spatial relations between digital media and society, relying on Marshall McLuhan's probes into the effects of communication technology. It argues that McLuhan's ideas may be relevant to understanding how contemporary space, digital media, and society adapt to one another. This aim is pursued in three steps. First, McLuhan's media theory is discussed with a focus on the effects of media in structuring the conditions of space perception at both the individual and the social levels. The concepts of visual and acoustic space are examined in relation to mechanical and electric media, respectively. Second, McLuhan's lifelong interest in the city as a learning environment is contrasted with his claim that cities are obsolete vis-a-vis the global village of instant electronic communication. The contradiction is more apparent than real, as McLuhan imagined a future for cities as programmed environments for the sensory training of citizens and actively engaged in discussions with urban planners and designers. Third, McLuhan's insights are extended beyond his time to make sense of the current relationship between digital media, space, and urban society. The evolution of cyberspace from a virtual realm to its hybridisation with physical space is traced across both literary and scholarly sources. The effects of a hybrid space concept on urban planning and design approaches in the digital age are explored. McLuhan's legacy, with its humanistic breadth, enables an understanding of the present media ecology that moves beyond the efficiency-oriented paradigm of the smart city discourse. The book bridges technological consciousness and social responsibility in the fields of space theory and spatial planning. It targets an audience that is open to interdisciplinary dialogue between science and the humanities to promote sustainable cities and communities.

This volume presents the third part of the proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality (TEEM) 2025. It explores the transformative role of emerging technologies and pedagogical methodologies in shaping the future of education across different domains such as health sciences and digital communication. Additionally, it examines how identity is formed in hyperconnected and natural learning environments, how gamification and serious games can boost motivation and learning outcomes, and how social media is reshaping the way we communicate and learn. Last but not least, this book also highlights the integration of cutting-edge technologies in multicultural healthcare education, and the use of learning analytics to better understand and support student learning.

Readers who wish to learn more about this topic can refer to 'Proceedings of TEEM 2025: Volume One' and 'Proceedings of TEEM 2025: Volume Two'.

This edited volume showcases how generative AI-especially large language and multimodal models-is revolutionizing education. Discover how these technologies personalize learning, spark creativity, and transform assessment, while addressing critical issues of trust, ethics, and fairness. Featuring leading voices from education and AI, the book explores real-world applications, innovative classroom practices, and the evolving role of teachers in AI-driven environments. With peer-reviewed chapters presented at an AIED workshop, this volume is a must-read for educators, researchers, and practitioners seeking to harness AI for inclusive, future-ready learning.

This book presents an innovative spatial framework for understanding and simulating urban residents' safety perception using street-level imagery and deep learning. Bridging GIScience, environmental criminology, and urban informatics, it explores how micro-scale urban environments shape fear of crime and perceived safety, offering both theoretical insights and practical modeling tools. Leveraging massive Baidu Street View datasets, convolutional neural networks, and spatial regression techniques, this book uncovers how visual features-such as greenery, lighting, cleanliness, and built structure-affect safety perception at fine spatial scales. It further integrates survey data, crime records, and machine learning to simulate perceived safety across neighborhoods. Designed for researchers and professionals in GIS, urban planning, public health, environmental psychology, and smart city development, this book is suitable for advanced students and interdisciplinary scholars seeking new methods in spatial perception modeling.

This book provides a detailed assessment of current smart city technology developments and their applications. It serves as an additional resource for researchers, urban planners, policymakers, and practitioners, showcasing the application of technology in urban environments to promote sustainability, resource efficiency, and livability. The objectives are to provide an analysis of smart systems and technologies adopted in smart cities around the world and to review existing case studies of successful smart city adoption in different parts of the world. Review existing case studies of successful smart city adoption in different parts of the world. To study the potentialities and difficulties accompanying smart city projects. Investigate upcoming smart city technology changes and developments. This book provides real action steps for city planners, politicians, and tech engineers. Future technological innovations strengthen smart city capabilities, making them more adaptable and responsive to their citizens' needs. This edited book delivers extensive research on smart city themes, mapping the theoretical bases and practical usage of these technologies and their prospective pathways. Thanks to its combination of essential theoretical groundwork, practical skills, and progressive outlooks, future readers obtain understanding and capabilities through this book.

How writers and artists have used city planning strategies to push back against harm

Black queer feminist thinker Audre Lorde famously declared that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." This language is normally understood as a metaphor, but as author Davy Knittle argues in this provocative book, queer and trans activists have long used the tools of city planning and urban design to create written and visual art that critiques those in power and offers points of resilience to their own communities.

A close look at the ways queer and trans writers and artists resisted predatory redevelopment in New York City from 1950 to 2020, Urbanist Desire draws on the work of James Schuyler, June Jordan, David Wojnarowicz, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, and Zeyn Joukhadar, exploring how they intervened in major political flashpoints like the War on Poverty, the AIDS-era housing crisis, and gentrification in Brooklyn and Queens. Presenting a new cultural history of New York City, Knittle explains how urban change and the more-than-human life of cities have been foundational concerns for queer and trans cultural production since the 1950s.

Ending with analysis of the 2022 speculative novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, Urbanist Desire looks to the past to imagine a better future for New York City and for all marginalized people. Knittle demonstrates how to move past a recuperative response to harm and toward one that can change the structure of society by documenting how queer and trans activists have engaged the strategies of planning and design to address spatial, social, and economic inequality.

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This volume presents the second part of the proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality (TEEM) 2025.

It brings together innovative research and practical experiences that explore how engineering and higher education can become more inclusive, effective, and socially responsible. It addresses key themes such as enhancing educational resources in engineering, introducing new approaches in mechatronics education, and promoting hands-on learning through Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) laboratories. This book also highlights efforts to bridge the diversity gap in STEAM fields and supports the integration of sustainable development goals within higher education.

Readers who wish to learn more about this topic can refer to 'Proceedings of TEEM 2025: Volume One' and 'Proceedings of TEEM 2025: Volume Three'.

A critical examination of the digital imagery and visualization tools that mediate urban life

Animated Urbanism explores the ways urban life is increasingly mediated by digital visualization tools, from elaborate marketing productions to specialized techniques of urban planning that rely on the collection of large datasets. By developing a critical vocabulary for these forms of digital imagery, Gillian Rose investigates the implications of using digital technology to manage the spatial and temporal organization of life in cities.

Pushing back against the so-called smartness mandate, which sees urban existence and its infrastructure as necessarily governed by big data, automation, and artificial intelligence, Animated Urbanism is a nuanced examination of the various types of media structuring urban life and their propensity to replicate highly gendered and racialized forms of human embodiment. From smartphone apps to special effects in movies to sophisticated "fly-through" videos of cities created by urban developers, Rose analyzes the corporate imaginaries that are being created, building on the influential theories of Donna Haraway, among others, concerning the interrelation of technology, power, and human life.

While recent digital analysis often focuses on the political economy of tech platforms or the efficacy of data in smart cities, Rose emphasizes the role of human subjectivity in the shifting configurations of these new urban landscapes. With an incisive, feminist approach to the imagery enabled by software and handheld devices, Animated Urbanism invites us to question how human life emerges from these complex entanglements of technology and visual culture.

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The entanglement of Vancouver's infrastructure in settler colonialism and racialized exploitation

Vancouver, Canada, has long been held up as an environmentally conscious coastal refuge and model of progressive urban planning. Unpacking the troubling complexities that lie beneath the city's otherwise tidy self-image, Terminal City reveals the long, recurring patterns of racialized violence and Indigenous dispossession crucial to its formation.

Examining the histories of Vancouver's infrastructures, including railways, ports, the freeway system, fossil-fuel pipelines, and property, Michael Simpson details the various spatial manifestations of settler colonialism and racial capitalism that constitute the city's urban environment-using it as a case study to reveal such tendencies around the world. Simpson exposes how the seizure of Indigenous lands and the destruction of Black communities has been foundational to the development of the city, and he highlights its structural dependency on these violent legacies, as well as the ongoing struggles to dismantle them.

Bringing together theoretical insights from the fields of urban geography, political ecology, and Indigenous studies, Simpson provides a distinctive intervention into contemporary debates around the material basis of logistics and circulation. At a time when massive upheavals to urban infrastructure are taking place in the hopes of establishing greater sustainability, Terminal City raises important questions about how this moment of transition might be harnessed to bring about decolonial abolitionist futures that redefine what a city can become.

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The definitive history of go-go music and culture

Go-go is the heart and soul of Washington, DC's African American culture-a source of resilience for the community and a way to celebrate Black lives. As the soundtrack of the District since the mid-1970s, go-go was designated the official music of Washington in 2020, and it has been incorporated into music genres such as hip-hop and R&B for decades.

Crankin! offers a rich narrative packed with photos that highlight go-go's key figures, bands, and moments-spanning fifty years from its beginnings all the way to its central role in the #BLM protests in 2020 and the #DontMuteDC and Moechella movements. This sweeping history of go-go music culture details the life of Chuck Brown, the "godfather of go-go," and documents the history of the genre's early pioneers, Trouble Funk, Rare Essence, and Experience Unlimited (EU). The book also covers EU's 1988 number one hit, "Da Butt," go-go's gospel and grown 'n' sexy subgenres, go-go's international impact, the bouncebeat sound, go-go lifestyles, activism, and, finally, the homecoming as go-go artists brought Chuck Brown's African-inspired beat to Africa.

Crankin! will entertain and inform fans of go-go as well as African American and American-created music; musicologists; scholars of American culture and subcultures; and readers interested in DC history.

How does tropicality - a concept historically rooted in colonial thought - shape colonial media and society? Thinking cinematically through a framework of tropicality - a constellation of ideas including forest, heat, humidity, miasma, microbes, logistics, labor, infrastructure, extraction, and animism - Nadine Chan demonstrates how colonial cinema created ambient spaces that enabled colonial power to take root and endure - as well as to wear away and break down. Beginning in the 1920s and continuing beyond British Malaya's independence in 1957, colonial filmmakers sought to transform Malaya's tropical landscape - long deemed unruly, excessive, and dangerous - into arenas of modernity and capital. In equatorial rainforests, rubber plantations, tin mines, villages, and more, colonial governments deployed open-air cinemas as ambient infrastructures of power - environ-mental surrounds that were at once elemental, atmospheric, cognitive, and affective. Weaving these cinematic environments within non-technological media landscapes that include architecture and urban design, supply-chain logistics, and more-than-human spirit networks in local animist cosmologies, Chan demonstrates how the colonial tropics calls for expanded understandings of media worlds. Meanwhile, phenomena such as floods and fungi, mountain spirits and mechanical failure, bacterial infections and militant insurgencies emerge as possibilities for counter-colonial attrition. Drawing on multi-modal methodologies including original archival research, film analysis, oral histories, on-site film screenings, and forest hikes as topographic memory-making, Chan develops an innovative theoretical and historiographical framework for thinking about media environments across multiple fields in media studies.

The violence of the cinematic cut in twentieth-century Latin American film

Splice, montage, close-up: modern cinema routinely presents bodies in pieces. Not unlike the guillotine, argues Thomas Matusiak, these techniques have served both overt and symbolic political ends as they accomplish and project the efficient production of severed bodies. In The Visual Guillotine, Matusiak traces the use of cinematic tools of dismemberment in twentieth-century Latin American film to theorize the symbolic and material violence of the cut.

A robust genealogy of Latin American cinematic politics, The Visual Guillotine encompasses national filmmaking traditions; radical and reactionary political registers; and the proliferated aesthetics of narrative, documentary, experimental, and expanded cinema through an innovative critical viewing practice. From the national cinemas of the 1930s to the decapitation videos produced in the Mexican narco-conflict and beyond, Matusiak shows how the cinematic cut has been employed to inspire terror as well as invoke and critique a range of political programs.

A refreshing dialogue between film theory and Latin American cultural studies, The Visual Guillotine offers a new way for film to conceptualize politics. In our present political moment, with rapidly generated and circulated visual media central to a resurgent leftist-populist battle against oligarchy and authoritarianism, this book calls for readers to reassess their viewing position when confronted with violent imagery.

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