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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Ethical issues & debates
SHORTLISTED FOR THE CWA GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION 'A gripping, unputdownable masterpiece' Hallie Rubenhold, author of the Baillie Gifford prize-winning The Five 'Ingenious history writing' Mail on Sunday 'Extraordinary' Guardian 'A masterwork' Australian Book Review 'Imaginative and compelling, impassioned and powerful, and deeply, deeply moving' Matt Houlbrook, author of Prince of Tricksters Lydia Harvey was meant to disappear. She was young and working class; she'd walked the streets, worked in brothels, and had no money of her own. In 1910, politicians, pimps, policemen and moral reformers saw her as just one of many 'girls who disappeared'. But when she took the stand to give testimony at the trial of her traffickers, she ensured she'd never be forgotten. Historian Julia Laite traces Lydia's extraordinary life from her home in New Zealand to the streets of Buenos Aires and safe houses of London. She also reveals the lives of international traffickers Antonio Carvelli and his mysterious wife Marie, the policemen who tracked them down, the journalists who stoked the scandal, and Eilidh MacDougall, who made it her life's mission to help women who'd been abused and disbelieved. Together, they tell an immersive story of crime, travel and sexual exploitation, of lives long overlooked and forgotten by history, and of a world transforming into the 20th century.
Large-scale, interoperable biobanks are an increasingly important asset in today's life science research and, as a result, multiple types of biobanks are being established around the globe with very different financial, organizational and legal set-ups. With interdisciplinary chapters written by lawyers, sociologists, doctors and biobank practitioners, Global Genes, Local Concerns identifies and discusses the most pressing issues in contemporary biobanking. This timely book addresses pressing questions such as: how do national biobanks best contribute to translational research?; What are the opportunities and challenges that current regulations present for translational use of biobanks?; How does inter-biobank coordination and collaboration occur on various levels?; and how could academic and industrial exploitation, ownership and IPR issues be addressed and facilitated? Identifying that biobanks foundational and operational set-ups should be legally and ethically sound, while at the same time reflecting the hopes and concerns of all the involved stakeholders, this book contributes to the continued development of international biobanking by highlighting and analysing the complexities in this important area of research. Academics in the fields of law and ethics, health law and biomedical law, as well as biobank managers and policymakers will find this insightful book a stimulating and engaging read. Contributors include: T. Bossow, T.A. Caulfield, B.J. Clark, A. Hellstadius, J.R. Herrmann, K. Hoyer, M. Jordan, J. Kaye, N.C.H. Kongsholm, K. Liddell, J. Liddicoat, M.J. Madison, T. Minssen, B. Murdoch, W. Nicholson Price II, E. Ortega-Paino, M. Prictor, M.B. Rasmussen, K. Sargsyan, J. Schovsbo, A.M. Tupasela, E. van Zimmeren, F. Vogl, H. Yu, P.K. Yu
Explores the politics and practice of programs that foster moral thinking and civic responsibility?highlighting the acclaimed and controversial Facing History and Ourselves (FHAO) curriculum, which uses study of the Holocaust to help students reflect on issues of racism, violence, intolerance, and prejudice.
Contemporary developments in the biosciences associated with new biological possibilities have generated considerable interest among the social sciences, primarily because they challenge our understanding of the relationship between the body, nature, and identity. Regenerative medicine is such a field, and has attracted major commercial, clinical, political and popular interest. It has, however, been subject to very limited social science analysis. This book explores the hype and promise associated with the field, the uneven and often failed commercial exploitation we have seen, and the political, legal and bioethical challenges that developments in the regenerative medicine field produce. It does this at a global level, including analysis of what we are seeing in the US, Europe, China and Australia. The book establishes the meaning, boundaries and likely future development we will see, and asks whether regenerative medicine heralds a new paradigm for medicine itself.
This book explores the idea of the prison boundary, identifying where it is located, which processes and performances help construct and animate it, and who takes part in them. Although the relationship between prison and non-prison has garnered academic interest from various disciplines in the last decade, the cultural performance of the boundary has been largely ignored. This book adds to the field by exploring the complexity of the material and symbolic connections that exist between society and carceral space. Drawing on a range of cultural examples including governmental legislation, penal tourism, prisoner work programmes and art by offenders, Jennifer Turner attends to the everyday, practised manifestations and negotiations of the prison boundary. The book reveals how prisoners actively engage with life outside of prison and how members of the public may cross the boundary to the inside. In doing so, it shows the prison boundary to be a complex patchwork of processes, people and parts. The book will be of great interest to scholars and upper-level students of criminology, carceral geography and cultural studies.
"Better Left Unsaid" is in the unseemly position of defending
censorship from the central allegations that are traditionally
leveled against it. Taking two genres generally presumed to have
been stymied by the censor's knife--the Victorian novel and
classical Hollywood film--this book reveals the varied ways in
which censorship, for all its blustery self-righteousness, can
actually be good for sex, politics, feminism, and art.
In this study, Stephanie Budin demonstrates that sacred prostitution, the sale of a person s body for sex in which some or all of the money earned was devoted to a deity or a temple, did not exist in the ancient world. Reconsidering the evidence from the ancient Near East, the Greco-Roman texts, and the Early Christian authors, Budin shows that the majority of sources that have traditionally been understood as pertaining to sacred prostitution actually have nothing to do with this institution. The few texts that are usually invoked on this subject are, moreover, terribly misunderstood. Furthermore, contrary to many current hypotheses, the creation of the myth of sacred prostitution has nothing to do with notions of accusation or the construction of a decadent, Oriental Other. Instead, the myth has come into being as a result of more than 2,000 years of misinterpretations, false assumptions, and faulty methodology. The study of sacred prostitution is, effectively, a historiographical reckoning."
Biotechnologies already on the horizon will enable us to be smarter, have better memories, be stronger and quicker, have more stamina, live longer, be more resistant to diseases, and enjoy richer emotional lives. To some of us, these prospects are heartening; to others, they are dreadful. In Beyond Humanity a leading philosopher offers a powerful and controversial exploration of urgent ethical issues concerning human enhancement. These raise enduring questions about what it is to be human, about individuality, about our relationship to nature, and about what sort of society we should strive to have. Allen E. Buchanan urges that the debate about enhancement needs to be informed by a proper understanding of evolutionary biology, which has discredited the simplistic conceptions of human nature used by many opponents of enhancement. He argues that there are powerful reasons for us to embark on the enhancement enterprise, and no objections to enhancement that are sufficient to outweigh them.
Based on interviews and participatory research, this book explores Thai women's experiences of the global sex trade. Kaoru Aoyama questions the long-standing feminist debate concerning how these women identify themselves: as sex workers, or sex slaves, while also considering the issues of gender, deviance, and migration.
What is the role of government in protecting animal welfare? What
principles should policy makers draw on as they try to balance
animal welfare against human liberty?
New York and New Jersey maintain almost identical laws dealing with abortion, but the process for developing those laws differed in each state. Courts were heavily involved in New Jersey, whereas most policy decisions came from elected officials in New York. In this book, Parent argues that these differences in the location of policy development in the two states are attributable to early changes that took place either in the courts or the state houses. These early changes set the narrative frame for how abortion was conceptualized in New York and New Jersey respectively, helping to lock in a legal or political outlook that kept development of abortion law and policy within its originating institution. Using the words of judges and justices from state and federal courts as well as lawmakers in the two states over a forty-year period, Parent demonstrates that how policy makers thought and wrote about abortion had a critically important impact on the extent to which courts or elected officials would ultimately create the laws that limited or expanded access to reproductive rights.
This book investigates what women enjoy about consuming, and in some cases producing, gay male erotic media-from slashfic, to pornographic texts, to visual pornography-and how this sits within their consumption of erotica and pornography more generally. In addition, it will examine how women's use of gay male erotic media fits in with their perceptions of gender and sexuality. By drawing on a piece of wide-scale mixed methods research that examines these motivations, an original and important volume is presented that serves to explore and contribute to this under-researched area.
Bioethics tells a heroic story about its origins and purpose. The impetus for its contemporary development can be traced to concern about widespread paternalism in medicine, mistreatment of research subjects used in medical experimentation, and questions about the implication of technological developments in medical practice. Bioethics, then, began as a defender of the interests of patients and the rights of research participants, and understood itself to play an important role as a critic of powerful interests in medicine and medical practice. Autonomy and the Situated Self argues that, as bioethics has become successful, it no longer clearly lives up to these founding ideals, and it offers a critique of the way in which contemporary bioethics has been co-opted by the very institutions it once sought (with good reason) to criticize and transform. In the process, it has become mainstream, moved from occupying the perspective of a critical outsider to enjoying the status of a respected insider, whose primary role is to defend existing institutional arrangements and its own privileged position. The mainstreaming of bioethics has resulted in its domestication: it is at home in the institutions it would once have viewed with skepticism, and a central part of practices it would once have challenged. Contemporary bioethics is increasingly dominated by a conception of autonomy that detaches the value of choice from the value of the things chosen, and the central role occupied by this conception makes it difficult for the bioethicist to make ethical judgments. Consequently, despite its very public successes, contemporary bioethics is largely failing to offer the ethical guidance it purports to be able to provide. In addition to providing a critique, this book offers an alternative framework that is designed to allow bioethicists to address the concerns that led to the creation of bioethics in the first place. This alternative framework is oriented around a conception of autonomy that works within the ethical guidelines provided by a contemporary form of virtue ethics, and which connects the value of autonomous choice to a conception of human flourishing.
Requests for the removal, relocation, and restriction of books-also known as challenges-occur with some frequency in the United States. Book Banning in 21st-Century American Libraries, based on thirteen contemporary book challenge cases in schools and public libraries across the United States argues that understanding contemporary reading practices, especially interpretive strategies, is vital to understanding why people attempt to censor books in schools and public libraries. Previous research on censorship tends to focus on legal frameworks centered on Supreme Court cases, historical case studies, and bibliographies of texts that are targeted for removal or relocation and is often concerned with how censorship occurs. The current project, on the other hand, is focused on the why of censorship and posits that many censorship behaviors and practices, such as challenging books, are intimately tied to the how one understands the practice of reading and its effects on character development and behavior. It discusses reading as a social practice that has changed over time and encompasses different physical modalities and interpretive strategies. In order to understand why people challenge books, it presents a model of how the practice of reading is understood by challengers including "what it means" to read a text, and especially how one constructs the idea of "appropriate" reading materials. The book is based on three different kinds sources. The first consists of documents including requests for reconsideration and letters, obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests to governing bodies, produced in the course of challenge cases. Recordings of book challenge public hearings constitute the second source of data. Finally, the third source of data is interviews with challengers themselves. The book offers a model of the reading practices of challengers. It demonstrates that challengers are particularly influenced by what might be called a literal "common sense" orientation to text wherein there is little room for polysemic interpretation (multiple meanings for text). That is, the meaning of texts is always clear and there is only one avenue for interpretation. This common sense interpretive strategy is coupled with what Cathy Davidson calls "undisciplined imagination" wherein the reader is unable to maintain distance between the events in a text and his or her own response. These reading practices broaden our understanding of why people attempt to censor books in public institutions.
Erotic dance is one of the most contentious issues in feminist debates today and a source of fascination in media and popular cultural representations. Yet, why is it that we currently know so little about those who perform erotic dance for female customers, or the experiences of these spectators themselves? The result of a unique investigation within two of the UK's leisure venues, Erotic Performance and Spectatorship seeks to rectify the aforementioned lack of insight. Through vivid ethnographies of a lesbian leisure venue and a male strip show, Pilcher's research advances key debates about the gender and sexual politics of erotic dance, whilst simultaneously relating these to debates about the sex industry more widely. This book also subverts previous assumptions that only women perform erotic dance and only men spectate. Thus, this book stands out amongst other academic accounts, developing the debate beyond the established focus on erotic dance as either empowering or degrading. This new contribution to the study of erotic dance - which provides a fresh theoretical perspective combining queer and feminist theorising, in addition to rich empirical evidence - will appeal to academic researchers and both undergraduate and postgraduate students within the fields of sociology, gender studies, sexuality studies, gay & lesbian studies, feminism and other neighbouring disciplines. It will also be of interest to feminist and sex work activists, policy makers, and practitioners.
The starting point for this book is the question of how we research sex for sale and the implications of the choices we make in terms of epistemology and ethics. Which dilemmas and ethical aspects need to be taken into account when producing qualitative data within a highly politicised and moral-infected realm? These two questions are exactly what Spanger and Skilbrei aim to unpack in this unusual interdisciplinary methodology book, Prostitution Research in Context. The book offers contributions from a number of scholars who, based on their reflections on their own research practice and the existing knowledge field, discuss ongoing methodological issues and challenges representative of international research on sex for sale. Some chapters deal explicitly with methodological dilemmas in research; others thematise the encounter between prostitution research and general texts on epistemology. Other chapters again actively engage with the ethical dilemmas that research on the topic of sex for sale can entail. The authors represent different disciplines, but share an interest in engaging in reflexive research practices informed by feminism and feminist epistemologies. An authoritative contribution to the field, this innovative volume will appeal to international scholars and students from across the social sciences and humanities in areas such as sociology, anthropology, criminology, media studies, feminist studies, human geography and history.
Today, we are inclined to believe that intellectual freedom has no greater adversary than the censor. In eighteenth-century France, the matter was more complicated. Royal censors envisioned themselves not as fulfilling a mission of state-sponsored repression but rather as guiding the literary traffic of the Enlightenment. By awarding pre-publication and pre-distribution approvals, royal censors sought to insulate authors and publishers from the scandal of post-publication condemnation by parliaments, the police, or the Church. Less official authorizations were also awarded. Though censors did delete words and phrases from manuscripts and sometimes rejected manuscripts altogether, the liberal use of tacit permissions and conditional approvals resulted in the publication and circulation of books that, under a less flexible system, might never have seen the light of day. In essence, eighteenth-century French censors served as cultural intermediaries who bore responsibility for expanding public awareness of the progressive thought of their time.
Powerful, wry essays offering modern takes on a primitive practice, from one of our most widely read death penalty abolitionists As Ruth Bader Ginsburg has noted, people who are well represented at trial rarely get the death penalty. But as Marc Bookman shows in a dozen brilliant essays, the problems with capital punishment run far deeper than just bad representation. Exploring prosecutorial misconduct, racist judges and jurors, drunken lawyering, and executing the innocent and the mentally ill, these essays demonstrate that precious few people on trial for their lives get the fair trial the Constitution demands. Today, death penalty cases continue to capture the hearts, minds, and eblasts of progressives of all stripes-including the rich and famous (see Kim Kardashian's advocacy)-but few people with firsthand knowledge of America's "injustice system" have the literary chops to bring death penalty stories to life. Enter Marc Bookman. With a voice that is both literary and journalistic, the veteran capital defense lawyer and seven-time Best American Essays "notable" author exposes the dark absurdities and fatal inanities that undermine the logic of the death penalty wherever it still exists. In essays that cover seemingly "ordinary" capital cases over the last thirty years, Bookman shows how violent crime brings out our worst human instincts-revenge, fear, retribution, and prejudice. Combining these emotions with the criminal legal system's weaknesses-purposely ineffective, arbitrary, or widely infected with racism and misogyny-is a recipe for injustice. Bookman has been charming and educating readers in the pages of The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and Slate for years. His wit and wisdom are now collected and preserved in A Descending Spiral.
In 1976, the US Supreme Court ruled in Gregg v. Georgia that the death penalty was constitutional if it complied with certain specific provisions designed to ensure that it was reserved for the 'worst of the worst.' The same court had rejected the death penalty just four years before in the Furman decision because it found that the penalty had been applied in a capricious and arbitrary manner. The 1976 decision ushered in the 'modern' period of the US death penalty, setting the country on a course to execute over 1,400 inmates in the ensuing years, with over 8,000 individuals currently sentenced to die. Now, forty years after the decision, the eminent political scientist Frank Baumgartner along with a team of younger scholars (Marty Davidson, Kaneesha Johnson, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Colin Wilson) have collaborated to assess the empirical record and provide a definitive account of how the death penalty has been implemented. Each chapter addresses a precise empirical question and provides evidence, not opinion, about whether how the modern death penalty has functioned. They decided to write the book after Justice Breyer issued a dissent in a 2015 death penalty case in which he asked for a full briefing on the constitutionality of the death penalty. In particular, they assess the extent to which the modern death penalty has met the aspirations of Gregg or continues to suffer from the flaws that caused its rejection in Furman. To answer this question, they provide the most comprehensive statistical account yet of the workings of the capital punishment system. Authoritative and pithy, the book is intended for both students in a wide variety of fields, researchers studying the topic, and-not least-the Supreme Court itself.
What if we could have babies without having to bear children, eat meat without killing animals, have the perfect sexual relationship without compromise or choose the time of our painless death? To find out, Jenny Kleeman has interviewed a sex robot, eaten a priceless lab-grown chicken nugget, watched foetuses growing in plastic bags and attended members-only meetings where people learn how to kill themselves. Many of the people Kleeman has met say they are finding solutions to problems that have always defined and constricted humankind. But what truly motivates them? What kind of person devotes their life to building a death machine? What kind of customer is desperate to buy an artificially intelligent sex doll – and why? Who is campaigning against these advances, and how are they trying to stop them? And what about the many unintended consequences such inventions will inevitably unleash? Sex Robots & Vegan Meat is not science fiction. It’s not about what might happen one day – it’s about what is happening right now, and who is making it happen. In the end, it asks a simple question: are we about to change what it means to be human . . . for ever?
Why Are We Yelling is Buster Benson’s essential guide to having more
honest and constructive arguments.
Why Are We Yelling will shatter your assumptions about what makes arguments productive. You'll find yourself having fewer repetitive, predictable fights once you're empowered to identify your biases, listen with an open mind, and communicate well.
Racial and ethnic categories have appeared in recent scientific work in novel ways and in relation to a variety of disciplines: medicine, forensics, population genetics and also developments in popular genealogy. Once again, biology is foregrounded in the discussion of human identity. Of particular importance is the preoccupation with origins and personal discovery and the increasing use of racial and ethnic categories in social policy. This new genetic knowledge, expressed in technology and practice, has the potential to disrupt how race and ethnicity are debated, managed and lived. As such, this volume investigates the ways in which existing social categories are both maintained and transformed at the intersection of the natural (sciences) and the cultural (politics). The contributors include medical researchers, anthropologists, historians of science and sociologists of race relations; together, they explore the new and challenging landscape where biology becomes the stuff of identity.
Selling Sex in the City offers a worldwide analysis of prostitution that takes a long historical approach which covers a time period from 1600 to the 2000s. The overviews in this volume examine sex work in more than twenty notorious "sin cities" around the world, ranging from Sydney to Singapore and from Casablanca to Chicago. Situated within a comparative framework of local developments, the book takes up themes such as labour relations, coercion, agency, gender, and living and working conditions. Selling Sex in the City thus reveals how prostitution and societal reactions to the trade have been influenced by colonization, industrialization, urbanization, the rise of nation states, imperialism, and war, as well as by revolutions in politics, transport, and communication. Contributors are: Pascale Absi, Dlila Amir, Deborah Bernstein, Francesca Biancani, Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette, Amalia L. Cabezas, Susan P. Conner, Satarupa Dasgupta, Mfon Umoren Ekpootu, Raelene Frances, Pamela Fuentes, Sue Gronewold, Hanan Hammad, Shawna Herzog, Philippa Hetherington, Nicole Keusch, Liat Kozma, Julia Laite, Nomi Levenkron, Mary Linehan, Maja Mechant, Fernanda Nunez, Marion Pluskota, Cristiana Schettini, Hila Shamir, Yvonne Svanstroem, Isabelle Tracol-Huynh, Michela Turno, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, and Mark David Wyers.
Intensive animal agriculture wrongs many, many animals. Philosophers have argued, on this basis, that most people in wealthy Western contexts are morally obligated to avoid animal products. This book explains why the author thinks that's mistaken. He reaches this negative conclusion by contending that the major arguments for veganism fail: they don't establish the right sort of connection between producing and eating animal-based foods. Moreover, if they didn't have this problem, then they would have other ones: we wouldn't be obliged to abstain from all animal products, but to eat strange things instead-e.g., roadkill, insects, and things left in dumpsters. On his view, although we have a collective obligation not to farm animals, there is no specific diet that most individuals ought to have. Nevertheless, he does think that some people are obligated to be vegans, but that's because they've joined a movement, or formed a practical identity, that requires that sacrifice. This book argues that there are good reasons to make such a move, albeit not ones strong enough to show that everyone must do likewise.
Reproductive technology allows us to test embryos' genes before deciding whether to transfer them to a woman's uterus. Embryo selection raises many ethical questions but is virtually unregulated in the United States. This comprehensive study considers the ethical, medical, political, and economic aspects of developing appropriate regulation. |
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