LSU Faculty Published Books

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Cybersecurity in Context : Technology, Policy, and Law

2025
Chris Jay Hoofnagle and Golden G. Richard III

The first-ever introduction to the full range of cybersecurity challenge, Cybersecurity is crucial for preserving freedom in a connected world. Securing customer and business data, preventing election interference and the spread of disinformation, and understanding the vulnerabilities of key infrastructural systems are just a few of the areas in which cybersecurity professionals are indispensable. This textbook provides a comprehensive, student-oriented introduction to this capacious, interdisciplinary subject.

Cybersecurity in Context covers both the policy and practical dimensions of the field. Beginning with an introduction to cybersecurity and its major challenges, it proceeds to discuss the key technologies which have brought cybersecurity to the fore, its theoretical and methodological frameworks and the legal and enforcement dimensions of the subject. The result is a cutting-edge guide to all key aspects of one of this century's most important fields.

Cybersecurity in Context is ideal for students in introductory cybersecurity classes, and for IT professionals looking to ground themselves in this essential field.
The Adult Learner: The Definitive Classic in Adult Education and Human Resource Development

2025
Malcolm Knowles, Elwood F. Holton III, Petra Robinson, and Corina Caraccioli

How do you tailor education to the learning needs of adults? Do they learn differently from children? How does their life experience inform their learning processes? These were the questions at the heart of Malcolm Knowles’ pioneering theory of andragogy which transformed education theory in the 1970s. The resulting principles of a self-directed, experiential, problem-centred approach to learning have been hugely influential and are still the basis of the learning practices we use today.

Understanding these principles is the cornerstone of increasing motivation and enabling adult learners to achieve. The 10th edition of The Adult Learner has been revised to include:

The two chapters on diversity, inclusion and belonging in adult learning, and andragogy and the online adult learner have been greatly expanded to reflect the importance of these topics to the field today.

The accompanying Instructor and Student Resources website provides free digital materials designed to enhance student learning and save instructors time when preparing lessons. Resources include:

• Ready-to-use PowerPoint slides to save instructor time when planning lessons

• Learning objectives and part outlines for structured learning

• Suggested class discussions, exercises, and scenario-based activities

• Downloadable instruments for chapters 19 to 22

• Video explaining the Andragogy In Practice model

• A chapter-by-chapter Instructor Manual and a corresponding Student Guide to enhance learning outcomes.

If you are a researcher, practitioner, or student in education, an adult learning practitioner, training manager, or involved in human resource development, this is the definitive book in adult learning you should not be without.
Fractional Integrals, Potentials, and Radon Transforms

2025
Boris Rubin

Fractional Integrals, Potentials, and Radon Transforms, Second Edition presents recent developments in the fractional calculus of functions of one and several real variables, and shows the relation of this field to a variety of areas in pure and applied mathematics. In this thoroughly revised new edition, the book aims to explore how fractional integrals occur in the study of diverse Radon type transforms in integral geometry.

Beyond some basic properties of fractional integrals in one and many dimensions, this book also contains a mathematical theory of certain important weakly singular integral equations of the first kind arising in mechanics, diffraction theory and other areas of mathematical physics. The author focuses on explicit inversion formulae that can be obtained by making use of the classical Marchaud's approach and its generalization, leading to wavelet type representations.
Practitioner Research in Voice Studies

2025
Rockford Sansom

Practitioner Research in Voice Studies aims to support the artist-scholar who wishes to design and publish research in voice. The book is useful for the novice, who wants tangible tools to begin, and for the more experienced researcher, who wants varying perspectives on how voice scholarship has evolved. The book contains three sections:

* Conducting Practitioner Research in Voice Studies

* Getting Started

* Practitioner Research Examples.

The first two sections outline major themes, debates, and research approaches in the field, and many chapters offer step-by-step guides and tips. The final section presents example research articles that highlight numerous methods including qualitative, quantitative, mixed-method, action research, performance as research, practice as research, literature review, narrative review, and other kinds of multidisciplinary practices. This ambitious project includes leading international figures who write in a scholarly and accessible manner.

Utilizing research ideas and examples from a variety of voice disciplines, this book will be of interest to those studying voice, speech, singing, acting, public speaking, voice science, communication, music, theatre, and performance. Those writing a dissertation or thesis may also draw from this text. Articles from this book were originally published in the Voice and Speech Review journal.
Voice and Identity

2025
Rockford Sansom

Voice and Identity draws from the knowledge and expertise of leading figures to explore the evolving nature of voice training in the performing arts. The authors look through both practical and theoretical lenses as they connect voice studies to equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging, and to gender and gender diversity.
Voice Work: Art and Science in Changing Voices

2025
Christina Shewell and Rockford Sansom

The voice is one of the fundamental modes of self-expression, a key touchstone of identity and sense of self. Many people in all walks of life are looking to change their voices, whether to modify a speaking challenge of some kind, to cultivate a professional skill, or for other reasons. Voice practitioners have an invaluable role in guiding clients along the path to their desired voice outcomes.

Building on the success of the first edition, Voice Work continues to offer a wide-ranging introduction to the repair, improvement, development, and exploration of the spoken and sung voice. Balancing rigorous scholarship with practical insights, the book draws from all major vocal professions and paths within voice work. It offers guidance for developing the voice alongside detailed, up-to-date insights into the work of voice instruction.

Readers of the second edition of Voice Work will also find:
- Numerous new colour illustrations
- Extensive chapter revisions and reference updates
- Original chapters on the history of voice work, public speaking and voice work online
- Updated material on voice and emotions, mindfulness and imagery, voice work and well-being, the applications of technology and the value of practitioner supervision
- Additional techniques and exercises
Voice Work is a valuable resource for spoken voice teachers, singing teachers, and speech and language therapists and pathologists. Endorsements from leading members of these professions for both the first and second editions are featured inside.
Categorical, Combinatorial and Geometric Representation Theory and Related Topics

2024
Pramod Achar

his book is the third Proceedings of the Southeastern Lie Theory Workshop Series covering years 2015-21. During this time five workshops on different aspects of Lie theory were held at North Carolina State University in October 2015; University of Virginia in May 2016; University of Georgia in June 2018; Louisiana State University in May 2019; and College of Charleston in October 2021.

Some of the articles by experts in the field describe recent developments while others include new results in categorical, combinatorial, and geometric representation theory of algebraic groups, Lie (super) algebras, and quantum groups, as well as on some related topics. The survey articles will be beneficial to junior researchers. This book will be useful to any researcher working in Lie theory and related areas.
The Carceral City : Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930

2024
John K. Bardes

Americans often assume that slave societies had little use for prisons and police because slaveholders only ever inflicted violence directly or through overseers. Mustering tens of thousands of previously overlooked arrest and prison records, John K. Bardes demonstrates the opposite: in parts of the South, enslaved and free people were jailed at astronomical rates. Slaveholders were deeply reliant on coercive state action. Authorities built massive slave prisons and devised specialized slave penal systems to maintain control and maximize profit. Indeed, in New Orleans--for most of the past half-century, the city with the highest incarceration rate in the United States--enslaved people were jailed at higher rates during the antebellum era than are Black residents today. Moreover, some slave prisons remained in use well after Emancipation: in these forgotten institutions lie the hidden origins of state violence under Jim Crow.

With powerful and evocative prose, Bardes boldly reinterprets relations between slavery and prison development in American history. Racialized policing and mass incarceration are among the gravest moral crises of our age, but they are not new: slavery, the prison, and race are deeply interwoven into the history of American governance.
Caring for Self : A Workbook for Early Childhood Educator Well-Being

2024
Jennifer Baumgartner

A workbook to relieve stress and burnout, Caring for Self: A Workbook for Early Childhood Educator Wellbeing supports early childhood educators in addressing the intricacies of their health--emotional, physical, cognitive, and social--in the increasingly complex and changing landscape of early childhood education. Go beyond the shallow aspects of "self care" like manicures and vacations and focus on the more fundamental, emotional parts of well-being. Increase your professional and personal wellbeing by strengthening your foundation of professional skills, reflective practice, and emotional support.

Every day, early childhood caregivers leave the field after experiencing workplace stress and burnout. Without adequate support and training, caregivers lack the ability to engage in the emotional work of caring for young children and their families. This workbook offers a three-pronged approach to mitigating compassion fatigue: building healthy relationships, establishing boundaries, and having a sense of agency. It teaches skills to help midgait burnout and compassion fatigue by building self-care and resiliency practices and helps caregivers identify their emotions around challenges, recognize barriers and bridges to meeting their professional goals, and implement tools for self-care and mentoring to increase their effectiveness while decreasing workplace stress.

Through abundant reflective questions and activities, this workbook helps the profession reflect on the meaning of well-being, identify emotions in the work, and engage in professional skills of self-stewardship to foster well-being. It walks through steps of reflection, identifying and accessing emotional support, and professional skill development in pursuit of well-being. It culminates in a six-step problem-solving pathway for identifying and resolving problems that arise in professional practice and the emotions that accompany them.
WORLD ATLAS OF RIVERS, ESTUARIES, AND DELTAS

2024
Jim Best, Stephen Darby, Luciana Esteves, and Carol Wilson

A stunningly illustrated atlas of the world's rivers, estuaries, and deltas, and their ecosystems

From the Congo and the Mekong to the Seine and the Mississippi, Earth's rivers carve through landscapes before coursing into the world's oceans through estuaries and deltas. Their inexorable flow carries sediment and more, acting as lifeblood for a variety of ecosystems and communities. More than any other surface feature of Earth, rivers, estuaries, and deltas are vitally important to our economic and social well-being, and our management of them often sits at the sharp edge of today's most pressing environmental challenges. The World Atlas of Rivers, Estuaries, and Deltas takes readers on an unforgettable tour of these dynamic bodies of water, explaining how they function at each stage of their flow. Combining maps and graphics with informative essays and beautiful photos, this invaluable reference book will give you a new appreciation for the power that rivers, estuaries, and deltas wield.

Features a wealth of color photos, maps, and infographics Brings together invaluable perspectives from leading experts Describes the rich biodiversity associated with the world's rivers, estuaries, and deltas Explains how rivers, estuaries, and deltas work, from river networks to deltaic floodplains, and sheds light on the erosion, movement, and deposition of sediment Describes the anatomy of rivers, estuaries, and deltas, from channel geometry and river planforms to estuarine shape and delta morphology Examines the ecology and ecosystems of rivers, estuaries, and deltas and how humans interact with these environments Additional topics include damming, climate change, water use, pollution, resource management, and planetary health, as well as future perspectives on these vital landscapes
Posthumanist Collaborations in Performance : A Praxis-Based Approach to Qualitative Inquiry

2024
Travis Brisini

Posthumanist Collaborations in Performance presents a novel approach for readers to engage with new materialist performance as a method of qualitative inquiry and as a means of combating the anthropocentric loneliness of modern life.

It offers a theoretical and practical examination of how we are fundamentally entangled with a more-than-human world through practices the authors call "naturecultural performances." The book features a collaborative body of arts-based research by three scholars working at the intersections of performance studies, new materialism, environmental studies, and qualitative inquiry. The result is an interdisciplinary body of theoretical scholarship, including a wide array of landscapes, plants, animals, minerals, and other more-than-human agencies. The book also presents practical examples and case studies of naturecultural performances, showcasing the diverse ways in which the concept of "natureculture" can be applied in research and creative practice.

This book will be of interest to faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, performance practitioners, and anyone else interested in exploring or creating work based on their own fundamental relationships with the more-than-human world.
Longing for Connection : Entangled Memories and Emotional Loss in Early America

2024
Andrew Burstein

Untangling the private feelings, ambitions, and fears of early Americans through their personal writings from the Revolution to the Civil War.

Modern readers of history and biography unite around a seemingly straightforward question: What did it feel like to live in the past? In Longing for Connection , historian Andrew Burstein attempts to answer this question with a vigorous, nuanced emotional history of the United States from its founding to the Civil War.

Through an examination of the letters, diaries, and other personal texts of the time, along with popular poetry and novels, Burstein shows us how early Americans expressed deep emotions through shared metaphors and borrowed verse in their longing for meaning and connection. He reveals how literate, educated Americans--both well-known and more obscure--expressed their feelings to each other and made attempts at humor, navigating an anxious world in which connection across spaces was difficult to capture. In studying the power of poetry and literature as expressions of inner life, Burstein conveys the tastes of early Americans and illustrates how emotions worked to fashion myths of epic heroes, such as the martyr Nathan Hale, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln. He also studies the public's fears of ocean travel, their racial blind spots, and their remarkable facility for political satire.

Burstein questions why we seek a connection to the past and its emotions in the first place. America, he argues, is shaped by a persistent belief that the past is reachable and that its lessons remain intact, which represents a major obstacle in any effort to understand our national history. Burstein shows, finally, that modern readers exhibit a similar capacity for rationalization and that dire longing for connection across time and space as the people he studies.
Voices of Sharpeville : The Long History of Racial Injustice

2024
Nancy Clark

This is the first in-depth study of Sharpeville, the South African township that was the site of the infamous police massacre of March 21, 1960, the event that prompted the United Nations to declare apartheid a "crime against humanity."

Voices of Sharpeville brings to life the destruction of Sharpeville's predecessor, Top Location, and the careful planning of its isolated and carceral design by apartheid architects. A unique set of eyewitness testimonies from Sharpeville's inhabitants reveals how they coped with apartheid and why they rose up to protest this system, narrating this massacre for the first time in the words of the participants themselves. Previously understood only through the iconic photos of fleeing protestors and dead bodies, the timeline is reconstructed using an extensive archive of new documentary and oral sources including unused police records, personal interviews with survivors and their families, and maps and family photos. By identifying nearly all the victims, many omitted from earlier accounts, the authors upend the official narrative of the massacre.

Amid worldwide struggles against racial discrimination and efforts to give voices to protestors and victims of state violence, this book provides a deeper understanding of this pivotal event for a newly engaged international audience.
Howard Weinbrot and the Precincts of Enlightenment :The Genius of Every Place

2024
Kevin L. Cope

This collection opens a panorama of essays celebrating diverse ways to participate in the British-and international-Enlightenment. Investigating major authors, unusual persons, commentators on other nations, scholars, and even early environmentalists, this volume explores the many amenable places where the confident culture of this period emerged
Brief CBT and Science-Based Tailoring for Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults

2024
Thompson E. Davis and Eric A. Storch

This book highlights the ongoing trend of brief treatments in psychotherapy for child and adolescent populations. Whereas their therapeutic predecessors may have taken 15 to 20 one-hour sessions or more, these newer therapies may begin to alleviate symptoms in only weeks, days, or even hours on the same day. Interest in child and adolescent brief and intensive therapies is currently at an all-time high on the heels of research showing impressive results for these interventions. Treatments such as One-Session Treatment for specific phobias which occurs in only one, three-hour session or Intensive Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy with Exposure and Response Prevention for obsessive-compulsive disorder which occurs 3-5 times weekly in 1-3-hour sessions over several weeks, are prominent examples. This volume builds on this growing interest and the emerging child and adolescent research, summarizing the efficacy of these interventions. Further, this volume will include key introductory chapters on the emergence of brief and intensive therapies, the ethics of their use, their cost-effectiveness, and the current state of the science. Brief therapies for specific disorders and via specific methodologies comprise separate chapters. Each chapter incorporates an exemplar case study (including a case overview, formulation/conceptualization, treatment description, follow-up, and recommendations for refractory cases). Also included are multicultural insights and ethical considerations. Furthermore guidance is provided on how to use the current and ongoing evidence base to inform formulation and treatment. This volume is timely and thorough in its presentation of the relevant literature and provides a much-needed resource for students, practitioners, and researchers alike.
The Limits of the Lost Cause : Essays on Civil War Memory

2024
Gaines M. Foster

The Limits of the Lost Cause' is a collection of essays that challenge the prevailing ways of thinking about the impact of the Civil War on the American South. Foster's introduction provides a comprehensive overview of scholarship on the Lost Cause and Civil War memory that highlights the emergence of two ways of thinking about these topics: an older one, pioneered by C. Vann Woodward, that made a case for a southern identity shaped by defeat and guilt; and a more recent one, prevalent not only in current scholarship but in the press and public discussion, that suggests the South is still fighting the Civil War. Foster challenges Woodward's definition of southern identity in his first three essays, one of which also compares the South's response to defeat to America's response after the Vietnam War. His next four essays address diverse topics: how Civil War became the war's name and what that reveals; the promotion of racist symbolism and also a renewed nationalism in Thomas Dixon's The Clansman and D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation; an exploration of the memory of Robert E. Lee that evaluates his suitability to be a hero for today; and the white South's role in the expansion of federal power in the first half of the twentieth century. Together those essays make a case for reunion and sectional reconciliation by the early twentieth century, which undermines the idea that the South was still fighting the Civil War. They also point to other lines of division within the United States, particularly between the nation's core and its periphery, in addition to the one between the North and South. Foster's final essay explores the complex divisions that have marked the fight over the public use of the Confederate battle flag over the last thirty years, making the case that the Lost Cause has had limited impact on support for the flag. Instead, Foster suggests, debates over the Confederate flag are rooted in differences in wealth and education, as well as urban-rural and deep partisan divides. Throughout these essays, and more explicitly in his conclusion, Foster argues that whenever one sees a Confederate flag or listens to an argument about Confederate symbolism, the temptation to talk about a continuing Civil War obscures more than it illuminates. Far more important, he suggests, is the extent of reunion and reconciliation between North and South, as well as the limits of the Lost Cause. Foster believes Americans need to acknowledge not only the failings of the white South but also the racial failings of the nation as a whole. 'The Limits of the Lost Cause' addresses issues of significant importance to historians of the United States, especially since Civil War memory is currently a trendy topic. Foster's work provides an overview of its historiography and offers a distinctive understanding of the Lost Cause that shows how reunion and sectional reconciliation were both important to understanding Civil War memory. Since the Lost Cause and the idea of a continuing Civil War are part of an essential contemporary public debate, this collection will appeal to a broad audience. Above all, Foster's work encourages Americans to confront the new divisions within their society even as they wrestle with old national - not just southern - failings
From Incarceration to Repatriation : German Prisoners of War in the Soviet Union

2024
Susan C. Grunewald

From Incarceration to Repatriation explores the lives and memories of the nearly 1.5 million German POWs who were held by the Soviet Union during and after World War II and released in phases through 1956, seven years longer than the prisoners of any other Allied nation. Susan C. I. Grunewald argues that Soviet leadership deliberately kept able-bodied German POWs to supplement their labor force after the end of the war. The Soviet Union lost 27 million citizens and a quarter of its physical assets during the war, motivating Soviet leadership to harness the labor of German POWs for as long as possible.

Engaging with recently declassified documents in former Soviet archives, archival material from multiple German governments, as well as innovative use of digital humanities methods and geographic information system (GIS) mapping, Grunewald demonstrates that Soviet authorities detained German POWs primarily for economic rather than punitive reasons. In fact, the GIS mapping of the historical materials makes it clear that most of the four thousand POW camps across the USSR were strategically located near industrial, infrastructure, and natural resource sites that were critical to postwar economic reconstruction.

From Incarceration to Repatriation is the first book to draw together the distinct fields of Soviet and German history to provide a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of German POW captivity in the USSR during and after World War II. Attending to the ways that the memory of German POWs remains in circulation in both the former Soviet Union and Germany, Grunewald tracks the political repercussions of war commemoration.
The French 75

2024
John Maxwell Hamilton

In The French 75, John Maxwell Hamilton tracks down the many lives of this protean cocktail. The drink, named by French propagandists during World War I, was said to pack a punch as powerful as that nation's celebrated 75 mm cannon. At the end of the century, the French 75 surfaced at Arnaud's Restaurant and became as entrenched in New Orleans as the famed second line. Hamilton explores the kaleidoscopic variety of the French 75 over the years and across continents.
Computational Design for Landscape Architects

2024
Brendan Harmon

This book is a guide to computational design for landscape architects replete with extensive tutorials. It introduces algorithmic approaches for modeling and designing landscapes. The aim of this book is to use algorithms to understand and design landscape as a generative system, i.e. to harness the processes that shape landscape to generate new forms. An algorithmic approach to design is gently introduced through visual programming with Grasshopper, before more advanced methods are taught in Python, a high-level programming language. Topics covered include parametric design, randomness and noise, waves and attractors, lidar, drone photogrammetry, point cloud modeling, terrain modeling, earthworks, digital fabrication, and more. The chapters include sections on theory, methods, and either visual programming or scripting. Online resources for the book include code and datasets so that readers can easily follow along and try out the methods presented. This book is a much-needed guide, both theoretical and practical, on computational design for students, educators, and practitioners of landscape architecture.
Unipotent Representations, Theta Correspondences, and Quantum Induction

2024
Hongyu He

In this paper, we construct unipotent representations for the real orthagonal groups and the metaplectic groups in the sense of Vogan. Our construction is based on quantum induction which involves the compositions of even number of theta correspondences. In particular, our results imply that there are irreducible unitary representations attached to each special nilpotent orbit.
Catastrophic Ciplomacy : US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the American Century

2024
Julia Irwin

Catastrophic Diplomacy offers a sweeping history of US foreign disaster assistance, highlighting its centrality to twentieth-century US foreign relations. Spanning over seventy years, from the dawn of the twentieth century to the mid-1970s, it examines how the US government, US military, and their partners in the American voluntary sector responded to major catastrophes around the world. Focusing on US responses to sudden disasters caused by earthquakes, tropical storms, and floods?crises commonly known as "natural disasters"?historian Julia F. Irwin highlights the complex and messy politics of emergency humanitarian relief.

Deftly weaving together diplomatic, environmental, military, and humanitarian histories, Irwin tracks the rise of US disaster aid as a tool of foreign policy, showing how and why the US foreign policy establishment first began contributing aid to survivors of international catastrophes. While the book focuses mainly on bilateral assistance efforts, it also assesses the broader international context in which the US government and its auxiliaries operated, situating their humanitarian responses against the aid efforts of other nations, empires, and international organizations. At its most fundamental level, Catastrophic Diplomacy demonstrates the importance of international disaster assistance?and humanitarian aid more broadly?to US foreign affairs.
The War that Made America : Essays Inspired by the Scholarship of Gary W. Gallagher

2024
Caroline E. Janney, Peter S. Carmichael, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean

This collection of original essays reveals the richness and dynamism of contemporary scholarship on the Civil War era. Inspired by the lines of inquiry that animated the writings of the influential historian Gary W. Gallagher, this volume includes nine essays by leading scholars in the field who explore a broad range of themes and participants in the nation?s greatest conflict, from Indigenous communities navigating the dangerous shoals of the secession winter to Confederate guerrillas caught in the legal snares of the Union?s hard war to African Americans pursuing landownership in the postwar years. Essayists also explore how people contested and shaped the memory of the conflict, from outright silences and evasions to the use of formal historical writing. Other contributors use comparative and transnational history to rethink key aspects of the conflict. The result is a thorough examination of Gallagher?s scholarly legacy and an assessment of the present and future of the Civil War history field.

Contributors are William A. Blair, Peter S. Carmichael, Andre M. Fleche, Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh, Caroline E. Janney, Peter C. Luebke, Cynthia Nicoletti, Aaron Sheehan-Dean, and Kathryn J. Shively.
CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF QUEER AMERICAN LITERATURE

2024
Benjamin Kahan

Moby-Dick's Ishmael and Queequeg share a bed, Janie in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God imagines her tongue in another woman's mouth. And yet for too long there has not been a volume that provides an account of the breadth and depth of queer American literature. This landmark volume provides the first expansive history of this literature from its inception to the present day, offering a narrative of how American literary studies and sexuality studies became deeply entwined and what they can teach each other. It examines how American literature produces and is in turn woven out of sexualities, gender pluralities, trans-ness, erotic subjectivities, and alternative ways of inhabiting bodily morphology. In so doing, the volume aims to do nothing less than revise the ways in which we understand the whole of American literature. It will be an indispensable resource for scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates.
Teaching Difficult Topics : Reflections from the Undergraduate Music Classroom

2024
Olivia R. Lucas and Laura Moore Pruett

Teaching Difficult Topics provides a series of on-the-ground reflections from college music instructors working in a wide variety of institutional settings about their approaches to inclusive, supportive pedagogy in the music classroom. Although some imagine the music classroom to be an apolitical space, instructors find themselves increasingly in need of resources for incorporating issues of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and historical trauma into their classrooms in ways that support student learning and safeguard their classroom communities.

The teaching reflections in Teaching Difficult Topics examine difficult themes that fall into three primary categories: subjects that instructors sense to be controversial or emotionally challenging to discuss, those that derive from or intersect with real-world events that are difficult to process, and bigger-picture discussions of how music studies often focuses on dominant narratives while overlooking other perspectives. Some chapters offer practical guidance, lesson plans, and teaching materials to enable instructors to build discussions of race, gender, sexuality, and traumatic histories into their own classrooms; others take a more global view, reflecting on the importance and relevance of teaching these difficult topics and on how to respond in the music classroom when external events disrupt daily life.
Conspiracy Narratives from Postcolonial Africa : Freemasonry, Homosexuality, and Illicit Enrichment

2024
Rogers Orock and Peter Geschiere

Decoding conspiracy thinking at the nexus of sexuality, Freemasonry, and the occult.

In this book, anthropologists Rogers Orock and Peter Geschiere examine the moral panic over a perceived rise in homosexuality that engulfed Cameroon and Gabon beginning in the early twenty-first century. As they uncover the origins of the conspiratorial narratives that fed this obsession, they argue that the public's fears were grounded in historically situated assumptions about the entanglement of same-sex practices, Freemasonry, and illicit enrichment.

This specific panic in postcolonial Central Africa fixated on high-ranking Masonic figures thought to lure younger men into sex in exchange for professional advancement. The authors' thorough account shows how attacks on elites as homosexual predators corrupting the nation became a powerful outlet for mounting populist anger against the excesses and corruption of the national regimes. Unraveling these tensions, Orock and Geschiere present a genealogy of Freemasonry, taking readers from London through Paris to francophone Africa and revealing along the way how the colonial past shapes present-day anxieties linking same-sex practices to enrichment.