News
Matthew Bronson and Tina Fields Coedit New BookAug 27 2009
Two members of the CIIS community, Matthew C. Bronson and Tina R. Fields, have coedited a timely book entitled So What? Now What? The Anthropology of Consciousness Responds to a World in Crisis, issued by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Bronson is a linguist and a core faculty in the Social and Cultural Anthropology program. Fields earned her PhD in the East-West Psychology program.
"The world is currently undergoing a period of unprecedented crisis on virtually every front: economic, ecological, and humanitarian," Bronson says. "It is starkly apparent that a shift is needed in our dominant structural systems."
The book includes 12 essays that attempt to define and respond to this crisis.
"The book emerged from a conference we held under the same title in 2006 and was inspired by a desire to make the intercultural study of consciousness relevant to contemporary issues," Fields says.
So What? Now What? features chapters on a range of cultures around the world, but grouped around common themes such as imagination, empathy, agency, dialogue, and ethics. Bronson and Fields are united in their belief that, "The greatest crisis of our times is a failure of the human imagination."
Avram Rubin, a graduate of the Social and Cultural Anthropology master's degree program, authored a chapter on healthcare outcome disparities. Bronson and Field each contributed their own chapters based on their original research on language socialization and environmental education.
An accompanying website allows readers to interact directly with the authors. Readers can post questions for the writers and access relevant resources and discussions.
