Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
197
result(s) for
"Loans Fiction."
Sort by:
Mia's boiling point
The Cupcake Club questions its loyalties when Mia makes friends with a mean girl in disguise.
Book
Gratitude and Learning
When Herold started her post-undergraduate career as a classroom educator, she recalls stating in her job interview that she wanted to make a difference in her students' lives. Today that strikes her as very Pollyannaish, but she was a twenty-two-year-old newly degreed English major with a Behavioral Science concentration who chose to read fairy tales, fantasy, science fiction, and romance as her elective reading. She was energetic and optimistic. She probably still is several decades and a different career later. It's rather ironic that when she was teaching, she took for granted the thanks of appreciative parents and notes and gifts of current and former students. She was immersed in the daily work of lesson planning, grading, and reading the history textbook to keep ahead of her students. It wasn't until she was teaching history that she took a college history course.
Journal Article
Who speaks for the university? Social fiction as a lens for reimagining higher education futures
This paper combines social fiction and academic analysis to envision hopeful futures for higher education. At the heart of the exploration is Phoebe Wagner’s speculative fiction piece,
University, Speaking
, which personifies a university grappling with environmental, political, and social change. Phoebe Wagner’s first-person narrative highlights the power of collective voice, the importance of centering community, and the urgent need to cultivate resilience and adaptability. Through analysis of key themes, this paper connects Phoebe Wagner’s fictional vision to contemporary research on the multi-faceted and complex challenges facing universities today. By integrating artistic and academic perspectives, this paper discusses new possibilities for universities navigating disruption and change.
Journal Article
NEW TECH, OLD PROBLEM: THE RISE OF VIRTUAL RENT-TO-OWN AGREEMENTS
This Article explores how fintech has disrupted the traditional rent-to-own (RTO) industry, giving rise to new, virtual RTO agreements (VirTOs). These VirTOs have enabled the RTO industry to expand into the service industry and to markets for products not traditionally associated with rentals, such as vehicle repairs, pet ownership, and medical devices. This Article analyzes this development. RTO agreements purport to rent products to a consumer until the conclusion of a set number of renewable rental payments, at which point ownership transfers. The fundamental characteristic of these agreements-and the reason why they are not regulated as loans-is that the consumer is able to terminate the rental agreement without penalty at any time by returning the merchandise to the rental company. RTO agreements are an extremely high-cost form of financing that were traditionally offered through brick-and-mortar stores, like Aaron's or Rent-A-Center, to low-income, subprime consumers who could not obtain traditional credit. The introduction of fintech, however, has shifted the RTO business model from traditional one-stop-shop, brick-and-mortar stores to partnerships between VirTO companies and retailers. As this Article explains, these new VirTOs have different attributes from traditional RTO agreements. In a VirTO, a third-party VirTO provider purchases the desired product from a brick-and-mortar retailer and then rents the product back to the consumer. The entire transaction between the retailer and VirTO company occurs online and unbeknownst to the consumer. This business model has allowed VirTOs to emerge in a variety of specialized markets and services. Not only are these agreements a high-cost method to ownership, but consumers often do not understand the agreements. Although VirTOs purport to be rentals, it is nearly impossible for a consumer to return a rental financed with a VirTO. Because the items rented with VirTOs are not practical to return, this Article argues that VirTOs are not, in fact, RTO agreements. Instead, VirTOs are a sophisticated form of disguised credit. This Article demonstrates that the VirTO industry is a legal fiction designed to avoid consumer protection statutes governing credit. Accordingly, courts should treat VirTOs as credit subject to state usury and federal consumer protection laws. This Article also proposes a series of policy recommendations to regulate VirTOs and to ban such agreements for services and nonsensical products, like vehicle repairs and pets. The policy solutions proposed in this Article provide a model for potential strategies to protect low-income and subprime consumers from the most extreme abuses as fringe financing industries grapple with the introduction of fintech.
Journal Article
How much of library digital content is checked out but never used?
Identifies patterns, trends and potential implications related to post-checkout non-usage (material that is checked out by a user, but subsequently never opened and/or downloaded) of library digital content. Source: National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, licensed by the Department of Internal Affairs for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand Licence.
Journal Article
Chalk Talks - Gordon College, Religious Liberty and Accreditation
The federal court in the Northern District of Georgia called it \"legal fiction\" that accrediting agencies are not state actors.4 Notably, a recent article in the Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy has called for the total scrapping of the notion that accreditation agencies are not state actors due to the entwinement of the federal government and the agencies.5 This new approach is the more accurate way to view accrediting agencies due to the necessity of accreditation for federal financial aid.6 The result of accrediting agencies being state actors is that there are religious liberty implications that must be examined in light of the Supreme Court's ruling in Obergefell.1 These concerns were not lost on the court.In the 2014-2015 school year, at four-year private colleges and universities, 89.6% of students received some state, federal, or institutional aid. 60% of that aid was in the form of federal student loans.20 It is no different at Gordon College where the tuition for the 20172018 academic year was $35,180.21 During that same period, 73.9% of the student body participated in a federal loan program, with the average undergrad borrowing $25,018.22 The inability to participate in federal loan programs would likely bankrupt Gordon College as it does to almost all schools that cannot distribute federal loans.The actions of NEASC are an overreach of an accreditors authority and could have had resulted in almost 2,000 students needing to locate a new university.28 If NEASC had revoked Gordon College's accreditation over the college's stance on same-sex marriage and its student handbook, then the accreditation agency would have been entering new territory for an accrediting agency.Since the accreditor is a gatekeeper and an arm of the state, its actions must be viewed through the leans of it being a state actor.[...]it goes counter to the ruling in Obergefell that religious organizations are protected \"to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths.
Journal Article
Student of Light
Recently I found out that he was the first of my mom's siblings to ask their father if he could leave the family to study engineering and music. Before I knew this, a dark and perverse part of me imagined and still imagines that he broke his fingers deliberately because he couldn't live towards his dreams. 7) I'd been in bed for seven days until a calm voice inside my head told me I needed to get up and talk to somebody, before I ended up like how I used to be-a major depressive and an addict. If I hadn't done that, it would've been published with a press where a man accused of sexual assault was an editor. 8) When I worked as an editor at a press a couple of years ago, I worked alongside an older white woman who had been there for years. What kind of teacher could go ahead with a syllabus and reading list that didn't reflect their students' lives and experiences?
Journal Article
Parallels: Web Weaving, Media Fandom, and the Role of Bookishness on Tumblr and Equinox; or, the Spirit of the Age
#parallels: Web Weaving, Media Fandom, and the Role of Bookishness on Tumblrinvestigates the literary meme format of “Parallel Posts” or “Web Weaving” on microblogging website Tumblr. Parallel Posts are transformative collages of quotes reflecting on the same theme and drawn from different sources. They emerged from Tumblr’s intersecting fandom, queer, and bookish communities in the late-2010s, rising with the fandom-cum-subculture Dark Academia.Through analysis of the hashtag threads #parallels and #web weaving and case studies of five user accounts that make and share Parallel Posts, I argue that Parallel Posts are symptomatic of a literary culture of digital hyperconnectivity (Brubaker 2020) in which curation of media is a key technology of the self (Foucault 1988). I analyse Parallel Posts’ most recirculated authors and texts, with especial attention to the recurrent themes of queer desire, body horror, and religious devotion in the works of Anne Carson, Richard Siken, and Hozier, and in television programs Supernaturaland Hannibal. Throughout, I evidence the active, dynamic role that literature plays in Tumblr users’ lives, mirroring historical commonplace books. As a result, I argue that Parallel Posts are a vital point of insight into literary reception in the digital age, and further suggest that such phenomena emphasise the necessity of interdisciplinarity – between fan, media, and literary studies – when studying the digital literary sphere (Murray 2018). I conclude by arguing that Parallel Posts are a climactic expression of Tumblr as a site of multimodal, personal, and fannish expression.Equinox; or, the Spirit of the Ageexplores the dominant themes of Parallel Posts and the ongoing relevance of Romanticism and Gothicism to the digital literary sphere. Set in a state of environmental and political crisis, it follows the partnership between Emiko Richter, an activist and author struggling with life on- and off-line, and Charlotte Richards, an aimless ex-prodigy grasping for meaning in the sciences. It integrates experimental digital media-based writing with traditional prose, interweaving four levels of narrative: the news and media landscape, Emiko and Charlotte’s story, Emiko’s life online under the false identity “Shelley”, and her writing in that role. Self, space, time, and aesthetics collapse in Parallel Posts, and so too in the novel, which presents hyperconnectivity itself as the ground of Gothic claustrophobia.
Dissertation
Debt Aesthetics: Medium Specificity and Social Practice in the Work of Cassie Thornton
This article considers the “debt visualizations” of social practice artist Cassie Thornton. Thorton’s works use a combination of photography, performance art, sculpture, non-fiction narrative, text, and hypertext to explore the cost and consequence of the accumulation of student loans. The essay examines Thornton’s use of both traditional and non-traditional artistic materials and practices in order to articulate how the ‘immaterials’ of debt become an artistic medium; her radical departure from traditional media leads squarely back to the problem of the medium itself in Thornton’s assertion that “debt is [her] medium.” While it is tempting to read such a claim as an embrace of a “post-medium condition,” this essay argues that in our highly leveraged present, the very form of unsecured student debt that Thornton works in and on invites a return to and a reconsideration of the seemingly conservative impulses of aesthetic Modernism and its critique.
Journal Article