This book investigates intractable conflicts and their main verbal manifestation - radical disagreement – and explores what can be done when conflict resolution fails. The book identifies agonistic dialogue - dialogue between enemies - as the key to linguistic intractability. It suggests how agonistic dialogue can best be studied, explored, understood and managed even in the most severe political conflicts when negotiation, mediation, problem solving, dialogue for mutual understanding, and discourse ethics are unsuccessful. This approach of viewing radical disagreement as the central topic of analysis and conflict management is a new innovation in this field, and also supplements and enhances existing communicative transformational techniques. It also has wider implications for cognate fields, such as applied ethics, democratic theory, cultural studies and the philosophy of difference. This book will be of great interest to students of conflict resolution, peace and conflict studies, ethnic conflict and International Relations in general.

Ryerson University in hosting a symposium entitled The New Paragone: The Cinema and Vanguard Art Movements . Inspired by Harmony & Dissentthe 3-day symposium examines Elder's startling claims about the influence of early cinema on avant-garde art movements. There will be panel discussions with key figures in visual art and film, screenings, and a book launch. Visit the Symposium website for more details.R. Bruce Elder argues that the authors of many of the manifestoes that announced in such lively ways the appearance of yet another artistic movement shared a common aspiration: they proposed to reformulate the visual, literary, and performing arts so that they might take on attributes of the cinema. The cinema, Elder argues, became, in the early decades of the twentieth century, a pivotal artistic force around which a remarkable variety and number of aesthetic forms took shape.To demonstrate this, Elder begins with a wide-ranging discussion that opens up some broad topics concerning modernity's cognitive (and perceptual) regime, with a view to establishing that a crisis within that regime engendered some peculiar, and highly questionable, epistemological beliefs and enthusiasms. Through this discussion, Elder advances the startling claim that a crisis of cognition precipitated by modernity engendered, by way of response, a peculiar sort of "pneumatic (spiritual) epistemology." Elder then shows that early ideas of the cinema were strongly influenced by this pneumatic epistemology and uses this conception of the cinema to explain its pivotal role in shaping two key moments in early-twentieth-century art: the quest to bring forth a pure, "objectless" (non-representational) art and Russian Suprematism, Constructivism, and Productivism.

This book's title suggests that it is a history of feminism. This is not true. Feminism is a social movment, but this book contains no analysis of the means by which women were able to achieve greater rights in the political and economic system. Rather, it is an overview of the times and places in which women obtained various rights. There is no mention of what strategies women employed in order to organize and demand these rights. Reading Freedman's book, it seems as if these rights were granted by a benevolent state or court system, not that they were the outcomes of organized efforts by women. This book is completely descriptive and contains no analysis whatsoever.