Masculine Empire: How Men Use Violence to Keep Women in Line

Gavin is troubled by the way his wife Rose has been acting lately. Ever since their three children started school and since Rose began retraining as a teacher, she’s been challenging his decisions. He’s now had more than enough of her arguing. His four drinking mates agree it’s not on and they are helping him think up ways to reign-in her wayward behaviour. He senses the gathering tension is upsetting the orderliness of home life, and he finds himself reaching out for new ways to keep her in line. This book provides a unique insight into the way men approach intimate relationships. It takes readers on a journey through a series of themes that highlight how men’s allegiance to each other plays a crucial role in why they seek to be in charge of their homes and in how this captures women in oppressive situations. It flips explanations for violence from what is happening in the minds of individual ‘bad’ men to a broader exploration of the social world of men. Its content eaves drops on the conversations of five men in a bar talking about their relationships with women. In this way it steps the reader through the embedded assumptions men make about women, the influence of the long history of men being in charge, the various strategies of control that men pass on to each other and, of course, the role that ‘masculine empire’ plays in fostering a sense of superiority and entitlement.. Auckland: Dunmore Press, 2012, ISBN 9781877399695

Fragmented Intimacy: Addiction in a Social World

This book steps outside traditional understandings of addictions and explores the potential of approaching them from a social perspective. Traditional approaches are dominated by what the book refers to as “particle” perspectives where the focus narrows down onto the person experiencing the addiction. This is most commonly represented in medical or bio-psycho-social approaches that start out from a position that reduces personal identity to socially isolated individuals. This focus on people as particles is further reflected in individualistic terms such as “disease”, “treatment” and “recovery”. Despite decades of research and development, particle-derived intervention approaches have yielded marginal gains in reducing levels of addiction. A shift in orientation may open up new possibilities. A social perspective shifts from thinking in terms of particles to looking at the person in terms of relationships. People become, in many ways, defined by the array of connections that comprise their social world. The reorientation generates interesting new opportunities for explanation and intervention. At one level, a person’s relationship to an addictive substance is seen to progressively strengthen at the cost of deteriorating relationships elsewhere. Accordingly, attempts at change involve reversing this process and gradually reintegrating fragmented relationships. At another level, the dominance of the addictive relationships has consequences for the more intense types of relationship we refer to as intimacy. The challenges of reintegration will involve supporting a process of productive interplay between intimates. At yet another level, relationships occur on a wider horizon involving networks of extended families, neighborhoods, workplaces and communities. The strength and resilience of their collective linkages is a critical resource to in responding to the fragmenting potential of addictive relationships. New York: Springer, 2008; ISBN: 978-0-387-72660-1

Gambling, Democracy and Freedom

This book looks ahead and asks where the increased reliance on profits from gambling is leading in the long term. It argues that the rapid commercial expansion of gambling through modern Western democracies can be likened to the commercial expansion of other primary exploitative industries such as native forest logging in countries like Indonesia and Brazil. Both expansions are propelled through the interlocked interests of governments, international companies, and local entrepreneurs. While widespread native logging results in multilayered impacts on natural ecology, intensified gambling consumption results in complex impacts on the social and political ecologies. Furthermore, advances in new technologies are opening up the opportunities for exploitation on scales that were never possible before. As the chainsaw enabled vast tracts of native forests to fall, so the proliferation of poker machine lures increasing numbers of people into regular use. The profits generated by increased consumption establish and reinforce a network of relationships that are increasingly reliant on these profits. Key recipients include industry employees, government agencies, political bodies, media organisations, community groups, charities, gambling helping organisations and researchers. The book looks closely at how relationships to the profits from gambling create environments that generate conflicts of interest that in the long run discourage active and critical participation in democratic systems. New York: Routledge, 2007, ISBN: 978-0415957625

Moral Jeopardy: Risks of Accepting Money from the Tobacco, Alcohol and Gambling Industries

Tobacco, alcohol and gambling corporations have been highly effective in stalling, diverting and blocking public health measures. This book provides an original and engaging exposé of the ethical issues faced by people and organizations when they accept industry money in ways that facilitate corporate influence with the public and with policy-makers. It starts with a detailed examination of the risks of accepting such profits and what might be done to reduce them, then moves on to introduce the concept of a continuum of ‘moral jeopardy’ which shifts the emphasis from accept-not-accept binaries to a focus on the extent to which people are willing to accept funding. This shift encourages people to think and speak more about the risks and to develop clearer positions for themselves. Each of the following chapters examines different aspects of the dilemmas associated with accepting such money and looks at ways of clarifying options. The content would be helpful to those working in government agencies, in addiction services, in community organizations, in research and those generally interested in ways of reduce harms from addictive consumptions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, ISBN 978-1-107-09120-7

Navigating Everyday Life: Exploring the Tension between Finitude and Freedom

By Peter J. Adams (School of Population Health, University of Auckland) Lexington Books (May 2018) Navigating Everyday Life explores the special moments, big and small, that rupture the surface of everyday life and that can help readers adjust to the disrupting effects of major life crises. The book delves into the nature of two fundamental forces, finitude (aspects that constrain a person to a situation, such as time, place, body, personality) and transcendence (aspects that enable movement beyond such constraints, such as story-telling or drug use). It explores how tension between these two forces enable ruptures or “fissures” to occur that interrupt consciousness and imbue life with meaning and vitality. Building on this framework, the book looks at the processes and circumstances that both facilitate and block tension between finitude and transcendence. For example a person can become lost in finitude when life seems overwhelmingly mundane and pointless. Conversely that person may end up lost in transcendence when surrounded by a vast array of future possibilities. It then illustrates how these tensions function in the personal and existential challenges faced by five members of a modern suburban family. Their stories traverse life transitions such as separation, depression, chronic illness, injury, violence, addiction, aging, death, and forgiveness. Along the way the tension between finitude and transcendence and associated fissures are seen to play a role in both triggering and sustaining journeys of healing. The book is recommended for scholars and others interested in the intersections between psychology and philosophy.

Reflecting on the Inevitable: Mortality at the Crossroads of Psychology, Philosophy and Health

Death studies have, over the last twenty years, witnessed a flourishing of research and scholarship particularly in areas such as dying and bereavement, cultural practices and fear of dying. But, despite its importance, a specific focus on the nature of personal mortality has attracted surprisingly little attention. Reflecting on the Inevitable combines evidence from several disciplinary fields to explore the varying ways each of us engages with the prospect of personal mortality. Chapters are organized around the question of how an ongoing relationship might be possible when the threat of consciousness coming to an end points to an unspeakable nothingness. The book then argues that, despite this threat, an ongoing relationship with one's own death is still possible by means of conceptual devices, or 'enabling frames', that help shape personal mortality into a relatable object.
In each chapter the subtleties and applicability of key ideas are enhanced through a series of illustrative narratives built up around the lives of four people at different ages living in two adjacent houses. Reflecting on the Inevitable is relevant not only to academics of death studies, but also those training and practicing in people-helping professions, as well as anyone experiencing or attempting to make sense of major life events.

How to Talk about Spiritual Encounters

This book develops a new and innovative way of understanding how language is used when people describe their spiritual and mystical encounters. Early chapters provide overviews of the nature of spiritual encounters, how commonly they occur, and the role of language. The book then develops a unique way of understanding the dynamics of talking about spirituality, using original research to support this perspective. In particular, I explore how this characteristically vague way of speaking can be viewed as an intentional and not an incidental aspect of such communications because certain types of vagueness have the capacity to engage the imaginative participation of receptive listeners. This expressive vagueness is achieved by embedding missing bits, or “gaps,” in the flow of what is described and these in turn provide sites for listeners to insert their own content. Later chapters focus on practical ways people (including helping professionals) can improve their skills in talking about their spiritual encounters. All content is situated in café conversations between four people each of whom is, in their own way, concerned with the challenges they face in converting the content of their encounters into words.

Monster Metaphors: When Rhetoric Runs Amok

This book explores ways in which common metaphors can play a detrimental role in everyday life; how they can grow in outsized importance to dominate their respective terrains and push out alternative perspectives; and how forms of resistance might act to contain their dominance.

The volume begins by unpacking the dynamics of metaphors, their power and influence and the ways in which they are bolstered by other rhetorical devices. Adams draws on four case studies to illustrate their destructive impact when they eclipse other points of view—the metaphor of mental illness; the metaphor of free-flowing markets; the metaphor of the mind as a mirror and the metaphor of men as naturally superior. Taken together, these examples prompt further reflection on the beneficiaries of these "monster metaphors" and how they promote such metaphors to serve their own interests but also on ways forward for challenging their dominance, strategies for preventing their rise and ways of creating space for alternatives.

This book will be of interest to scholars interested in the study of metaphor, across such fields as linguistics, rhetoric and media studies.