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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > General
Contrary to the expectations of many people, China's recent
economic growth has not led to the collapse of the Chinese
Communist Party. In fact, the Party has recently carried out a
peaceful and orderly transition to the so-called fourth generation
of leadership, has revitalised itself, and created a new, younger
and better trained cadre corps. Despite this successful
transformation, there continue to be many problems that the Party
will need to overcome if it is to remain in power, including
pressures for democratization in both urban and rural areas,
widespread corruption, the emergence of new social groups, and
increasing dissatisfaction among workers who seem to be losing out
in the present transition process.
This book offers a history of Japanese television audiences and the popular media culture that television helped to spawn. In a comparatively short period, the television industry helped to reconstruct not only postwar Japanese popular culture, but also the Japanese social and political landscape. During the early years of television, Japanese of all backgrounds, from politicians to mothers, debated the effects on society. The public discourse surrounding the growth of television revealed its role in forming the identity of postwar Japan during the era of high-speed growth (1955-1973) that saw Japan transformed into an economic power and one of the world's top exporters of television programming.
Over the last twenty years the proportion of development cooperation resources earmarked for agricultural development has dwindled to between six and seven per cent of total bi- and multilateral Official Development Assistance. This is despite the fact that eighty per cent of the world's poor live in rural agricultural areas and that the poor are disproportionately affected when political, military and natural events lead to regional or global food shortages. Brandt and Otzen's key book fills a gap in current literature, undertaking a wide-ranging conceptual reorientation of development cooperation, criticizing the current orthodoxy and its bias towards urban areas, and arguing that in order to effectively alleviate poverty across the world, agricultural and rural development measures need to be implemented both by central and subnational governments, aid agencies and the private sector. The authors investigate the world food question, the current pressures it is under and its link to rural poverty, and set out the policies that need to be undertaken to reduce global poverty.
North Korea features highly on the agenda of the main actors in East Asia and around the globe, and many large foreign policy initiatives have been undertaken since the structural constraints of the Cold War started to loosen in the early 1990s. The centrality of North Korea has been particularly emphasized by the country's suspected development of nuclear weapons which is regarded as one of the largest de-stabilising factors in the Asia-Pacific region. This comprehensive book analyzes the formation of the North Korea policy in the context of great power relations in East Asia, specifically focusing on Japan's policy formation and 'the Japan factor' in the North Korea policies of other concerned great powers, namely the US, China, Russia, South Korea and the EU. By adopting an empirical focus on the international interaction over North Korea, this book brings together issues that are highly relevant to contemporary Japanese foreign policy; clarifies what is happening in the region right now and plots what policy options are available for the future. Policy-oriented and based on careful empirical analysis, North Korea Policy will appeal to both policy makers and scholars of Asian foreign policy.
A fresh historical and theoretical exploration of the much-debated,
but still elusive, question of the Korean divide. In contrast to
much of the literature on the divide, which deals with
state-building on the two sides of the Demilitarized Zone, this
book sheds light on the slow, but steady process of homogenization
between the two estranged peoples, as accelerated after the end of
the Cold War and especially after the inauguration of President Kim
Dae-jung in 1998.
This new book shows how the idea of a strategic triangle can
illuminate the security relationships among the United States, the
European Union and Russia in the greater transatlantic sphere.
Hitherto, the academic study of Indian cinema has focused primarily on Bollywood, despite the fact that the Tamil film industry, based in southern India, has overtaken Bollywood in terms of annual output. This book examines critically the cultural and cinematic representations in Tamil cinema. It outlines its history and distinctive characteristics, and proceeds to consider a number of important themes such as gender, religion, class, caste, fandom, cinematic genre, the politics of identity and diaspora. Throughout, the book cogently links the analysis to wider social, political and cultural phenomena in Tamil and Indian society. Overall, it is an exciting and original contribution to an under-studied field, also facilitating a fresh consideration of the existing body of scholarship on Indian cinema.
Between 1966 and 1975 North American youth activists established over 35 school- and community-based gay liberation youth groups whose members sought control over their own bodies, education, and sexual and social relations. This book focuses on three groundbreaking New York City groups -- Gay Youth (GY), Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.), and the Gay International Youth Society of George Washington High School (GWHS) -- from the advent of gay liberation in NYC in 1969 to just after its dissolution and the rise of identity politics by 1975. Cohen examines how gay liberation -- with its rejection of stultifying sex roles, attack on institutional oppression, connection between personal and political liberation, celebration of innate androgyny, and resolute anti-war and anti-capitalist stance -- shaped understandings of sexual identity, membership criteria, organization, decision-making, the roles of youth and adults, and efforts to effect social change.
Military action in South Ossetia, growing tensions with the United States and NATO, and Russia's relationship with the European Union demonstrate how the issue of Russian nationalism is increasingly at the heart of the international political agenda.This book considers a wide range of aspects of Russian nationalism, focussing on the Putin period. It discusses the development of Russian nationalism, including in the Soviet era, and examines how Russian nationalism grows out of ? or is related to ? ideology, culture, racism, religion and intellectual thinking, and demonstrates how Russian nationalism affects many aspects of Russian society, politics and foreign policy. This book examines the different socio-political phenomena which are variously defined as ?nationalism?, ?patriotism? and ?xenophobia?. As Russia reasserts itself in the world, with Russian nationalism as one of the key driving forces in this process, an understanding of Russian nationalism is essential for understanding the dynamics of contemporary international relations.
Events of the past twenty years, including the Cold War and the
War on Terror, have meant that the environments of international
development co-operation have changed extensively, with dramatic
consequences for development policies and North-South relations in
general.
Perspectives on European Development Cooperation takes stock of
such changes, describing and analyzing the new European development
agenda, including the role of the European Union. Essays by
prominent authorities in the field examine the development policies
of individual donor countries and focus on the principles and
objectives governing aid strategies and the performances of these
policies.
This book will be of interest to students of development studies and those involved in determining development policy.
The work explores the complex and profound implications of digital technology for a stunning variety of spaces, ranging from science and cinema to citizenship and bazaars. It maps the multiple ways in which the 'new' media rewrites the 'old', and the dilemmas and issues that they pitch - questioning, in turn, recieved notions of knowledge, legality, ethics, privacy, identity and community. The book argues that the old and the new media are neither radically different nor the same: while the mutability of a narrative, whether on the printed page or on a digitally recorded disk remains, there are intrinsic differences between print and digital print.
This book examines China's creative economy-and how television, animation, advertising, design, publishing and digital games are reshaping traditional understanding of culture. Since the 1950s China has endeavoured to catch-up with advanced Western economies. 'Made in China' is one approach to global competitiveness. But a focus on manufacturing and productivity is impeding innovation. China imports creativity and worries about its 'cultural exports deficit'. In the cultural sector Chinese audiences are attracted to Korean, Taiwanese, and Japanese culture, as well as Hollywood cinema. This book provides a fresh look looks at China's move up the global value chain. It argues that while government and (most) citizens would prefer to associate with the nationalistic, but unrealized 'created in China' brand, widespread structural reforms are necessary to release creative potential. Innovation policy in China has recently acknowledged these problems. It considers how new ways of managing cultural assets can renovate largely non-competitive Chinese cultural industries. Together with a history of cultural commerce in China, the book details developments in new creative industries and provides the international context for creative cluster policy in Beijing and Shanghai.
Providing a wealth of empirical research on the everyday practise of Islam in post-Soviet Central Asia, this book gives a detailed account of how Islam is understood and practised among ordinary Muslims in the region, focusing in particular on Uzbekistan. It shows how individuals negotiate understandings of Islam as an important marker for identity, grounding for morality and as a tool for everyday problem-solving in the economically harsh, socially insecure and politically tense atmosphere of present-day Uzbekistan. Presenting a detailed case-study of the city of Bukhara that focuses upon the local forms of Sufism and saint veneration, the book shows how Islam facilitates the pursuit of more modest goals of agency and belonging, as opposed to the utopian illusions of fundamentalist Muslim doctrines.
Interdisciplinary collaboration in the social sciences is obviously essential to scientific progress, but discontent and practical difficulties hinder collaboration in research and training. Many of the problems arise from the failure in the separate disciplines to understand the basis on which collaboration is necessary and possible. In an effort to shed light on the situation, these original essays by eminent scholars--economists, geographers, psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and others--demonstrate effective means of achieving interdisciplinary coordination in studying human behavior and delineating promising areas--for cooperative research. The book provides a sophisticated guide to the nature of knowledge in social science as applied to its core disciplines. Since the social sciences separately are studying and theorizing about many of the same kinds of human behavior, the contributors propose that scholars can avoid possible duplication of effort and increase the validity of their formulations by consulting the related findings and methodology from other disciplines before embarking on a research problem. The contributors maintain that this interchange, by broadening the total knowledge of each discipline, represents the best approach toward fulfilling the goals of social scientific inquiry. The individual chapters give valuable insight into the theoretical overlaps among the disciplines and outline specific research areas--such as group interaction, political attitudes, and intergroup relations--that require interdisciplinary cooperation to produce valid formulations. A major step toward creating a dialogue among disciplines, the book will enable every social scientist to understand more clearly the current state and future direction of interdisciplinary relationships and their indispensable future in social scientific thought.
This timely book brings together ten scholars in the varied fields of philosophy, theology, history, anthropology, and literature to reflect on the theme of courage. Contributors to this volume agree that courage is not just for the few or the dramatically heroic. While some of the authors do invoke awe-inspiring instances of death-defying courage, all recognize that courage is required of every one of us. The first section of Courage, entitled "Courage in Philosophy and Literature, " begins with William Desmond's exploration of the transcendent dimension of courage, which comes to us not from within ourselves but from beyond ourselves. Leroy Rouner's essay utilizes Paul Tillich's interpretation of faith as courage in The Courage to Be and then goes on to suggest that original sin be understood in today's terms as ontological loneliness. Remi Brague, following Nietzsche, finds that the virtue called for in modern times is intellectual honesty -- the courage to face the truth. Geoffrey Hill's essay looks at depictions of courage in the writings of Shakespeare and his immediate predecessors. Philip Ivanhoe suggests that Aristotle's understanding of courage can be deepened by the writings of the Confucian thinker Mengzi (Mencius), who insisted that "great courage" -- courage directed toward morally praiseworthy ends -- is the result of a continuing process of self-cultivation. The second section, "Courage in War, Peace, and Nation Building, " includes John Taylor's study of courage in wartime, which focuses particularly on Robert E. Lee and his courage. Daniel Berrigan's piece, on the other hand, finds in the famous Isaiah text "And they will hammer their swords into plowshares" asummons to peace making. Lucius Outlaw calls for courage from each of us in constructing a multiracial, multiethnic democracy with "justice for all." "Courage Every Day" is the theme of the final section. Robert Neville illuminates the many varieties of courage called for each day of our lives, including the courage to dare, the courage of self-identity, the courage to love, and the courage to be alone. Katherine Platt concludes these explorations of courage with the hope-inspiring suggestion that courage is a habit we can practice.
At a time when the U.S. flag is both a source of both pride and controversy, this volume provides the first encyclopedic A-to-Z treatment of the U.S. flag in American history, culture, and law. This title is a comprehensive resource for understanding all aspects of the American flag and its relationship to the American people. The encyclopedia provides a thorough historical examination of key developments in the flag's design as well as laws and court decisions related to the flag and the First Amendment. In relation to the flag's history, it also discusses evolving public attitudes about its importance as a national symbol. The encyclopedia contains illuminating scholarly essays on presentations of the flag in American politics, the military, and popular culture including art, music, and journalism. Additionally, these essays address important rules of flag etiquette and modern controversies related to them, from flag-burning to refusing to stand during the playing of the U.S. National Anthem.
Though America experienced an increase in a native-born population and an emerging African-American identity throughout the nineteenth century, African culture did not necessarily dissipate with each passing decade. Archer examines the slave narratives of four key members of the abolitionist movement Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Harriet Tubman and Harriet Jacobs revealing how these highly visible proponents of the antislavery cause were able to creatively engage and at times overcome the cultural biases of their listening and reading audiences. When engaged in public sphere discourses, these individuals were not, as some scholars have suggested, inclined to accept unconditionally stereotypical constructions of their own identities. Rather they were quite skillful in negotiating between their affinity with antislavery Christianity and their own intimate involvement with slave circle dance and improvisational song, burial rites, conjuration, divination, folk medicinal practices, African dialects and African inspired festivals. The authors emerge as more complex figures than scholars have imagined. Their political views, though sometimes moderate, often reflected a strong desire to strike a fierce blow at the core of the slavocracy.
Maid in China is the first systematic, book-length investigation of internal rural migration in post-Mao China focused on the day-to-day production and consumption of popular media. Taking the rural maid in the urban home as its point of departure, the book weaves together three years of engaged ethnographic research in Beijing and Shanghai with critical analyses of a diverse array of popular media, and follows three lines of inquiry: media and cultural production, consumption practices, and everyday politics. It unravels some of the myriad ways in which the subaltern figure of the domestic worker comes to be inscribed with the cultural politics of boundaries that entrench a host of inequalities-between rich and poor, male and female, rural and urban. Wanning Sun explores a number of paradoxes that the domestic worker lives out on a daily basis: her ubiquitous invisibility, her enduring transience, and her status as an intimate stranger. Collectively, these paradoxes afford her a unique window onto the spaces and practices of the modern Chinese city. This intimate stranger's epistemological status makes her an unauthorized yet authoritative witness of urban residents' social lives, offering a revealing lens through which to examine both the formation of new social relations in post-reform urban China, and the new social uses of space-both domestic and public-engendered by these relations.
This book examines the strategic interactions among China, the United States, Japan, and Southeast Asian States in the context of China s rise and globalization after the cold war. Engaging the mainstream theoretical debates in international relations, the author introduces a new theoretical framework institutional realism to explain the institutionalization of world politics in the Asia-Pacific after the cold war. Institutional realism suggests that deepening economic interdependence creates a condition under which states are more likely to conduct a new balancing strategy institutional balancing, i.e., countering pressures or threats through initiating, utilizing, and dominating multilateral institutions to pursue security under anarchy. To test the validity of institutional realism, Kai He examines the foreign policies of the U.S., Japan, the ASEAN states, and China toward four major multilateral institutions, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum (ARF), ASEAN Plus Three (APT), and East Asian Summit (EAS). Challenging the popular pessimistic view regarding China s rise, the book concludes that economic interdependence and structural constraints may well soften the "dragon s teeth." China s rise does not mean a dark future for the region. Institutional Balancing in the Asia Pacific will be of great interest to policy makers and scholars of Asian security, international relations, Chinese foreign policy, and U.S. foreign policy.
Driven by the need to identify, classify and assess western technology and culture together with a desire to advance a dialogue for reviewing the so-called 'unequal treaties' - the new Meiji government of 1868 despatched a top-level ministerial team to the west which, in 1872, arrived in the United States. In all, they spent 205 days in America, 122 days in Britain and two months in France, as well as visiting other countries including Belgium, Germany, Russia, Sweden and Italy. Drawing on the papers given at the triennial conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies, held in Budapest in August 1997 (the year also marking the 125th anniversary of Iwakura's arrival), this volume presents a valuable new overview of the mission as a whole, with the significance and impact of the visit to each country being separately assessed. A supplement to the book looks at several 'post-Iwakura' topics, including a review of the mission's chief chronicler, Kume Kunitake.
The articles in this collection indicate the still powerful role of queer theory in questioning the political, social, cultural, institutional hegemony of heterosexuality in culture and society at large as well as in academic research institutions. Written from the perspective of the northern European periphery, Queering Norway specifically reflects the challenges queer theory poses for ways of thinking about sexuality and identity in Norway. At the same time, the questions raised in the articles have wide relevance. From within their various fields (sociology, anthropology, ethnology, archeology, linguistics, psychology, media studies and religious studies) the writers attempt to develop a language enabling them to recognize the multiple social relations possible in contemporary societies, a language in which neither "queer" nor "homosexual" ousts the other, but in which the goal is to work, read, and write in the in-between spaces where no single difference is elevated above any other. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality.
The history of Chinese medicine hinges on three major turning points: the formation of canonical theory in the Han dynasty; the transformation of medicine via the integration of earlier medical theories and practices in the Song dynasty; and the impact of Western medicine from the nineteenth century onwards. This book offers a comprehensive overview of the crucial second stage in the evolution of Chinese medicine by examining the changes in Chinese medicine during the pivotal era of the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127). Scholars often characterize the Northern Song era as a time of change in every aspect of political, social, intellectual or economic life. More specifically it focuses on three narratives of change:
As the first book to study the transformation medicine underwent during the Northern Song period this volume will appeal to Sinologists and scholars of the history of medicine alike.
This is the first explanation and evaluation of Taiwan's defence forces and infrastructure. It examines not only Taiwan's armed forces, but also its Ministry of National Defence, personnel issues, and civil-military relations. This book provides crucial base-line data and evaluation of one of the major participants in an ongoing crisis across the Taiwan Strait that has the potential of involving China and the United States in armed conflict. It examines the danger of a possibly nuclear conflict between China and the United States which would seriously disrupt all of East Asia. It also shows how Taiwan's defence policies and actions do not match the threat - Taipei needs to develop and pursue realistic policies. This is essential reading for all students of East Asian security and Sino-American relations and of international and security studies in general. |
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