These essays by leading theorists and researchers in sociocultural, cognitive, developmental and educational psychology honour the memory of Sylvia Scribner, whose work is recognized by each of the authors as seminal to their own thinking. The themes include the relationship between history and culture, the importance of context to thinking, the place of literacy in human activity and thought, and cognition in school and in the workplace. The volume presents applications of activity theory to fundamental issues in human behaviour at work, in school, and in problem solving situations, and it analyses historical-societal processes in science and culture. Scribner's conviction that science holds a responsibility to human welfare and understanding is carried on in these chapters. Sociocultural Psychology is crucial reading for researchers and graduate students in sociocultural, cognitive, developmental and educational psychology.

This book examines the persistence of religious belief in an America that has become increasingly secular. A series of essays addresses specific aspects of the interaction between the sacred and the secular in modern U.S. history and offers a unique perspective on how the two have transformed each other as well as the nature of American religious culture. By bringing these varied articles together, the editors have provided a new framework for interpreting our culture from a religious perspective. What makes this book unique is the broad-ranging nature of its examination of religion and culture. The essays cover such diverse topics as religion and popular culture, ethnicity and race, religion and women, religion and medicine, and the endurance of evangelical traditions, while also placing American religion in a larger, historical framework. A brief introduction discusses the difficult task of understanding religious expression in modern American culture. Touching on so many different subjects, the book is relevant to both historians and a general public interested in American religious culture. It will be a vital addition to academic and public libraries and valuable for courses in American and religious history, sociology, and political science.

reviews a wide-range of genetically modified (GM) crops, to understand how they are produced, the impacts on the agricultural industry, and the potential for improving food security. examines how food security can be achieved through GM crops. provides an important synthesis of GM crops from their commercial value to the agricultural industry, as well as their potential for improving food security. will be of great interest to students and scholars of agricultural engineering, crop science, food biotechology, food security and those interested in food and agriculture and sustainable development more broadly.

Cultural Writing. Political Science. CONSENSUS OR COERCION? offers a new perspective on post-war British history and the welfare state. It examines the relationship between 'the people' and 'the state' in areas as diverse as race relations, housing, social services, political activism, television and the family. Focusing upon the notion of social cohesion, the book argues that the British state's ability to represent itself as the crucial factor in the maintenance of this social cohesion has been of paramount importance to the state's continued existence.

The Pathogenesis of Fear gathers together diverse conversations about cultural constructions of the monstrous. Interdisciplinary essays map the margins of monstrosity as follows: the cannibalistic paradox in Kleist's late-Romantic Penthesilea; intersections of the monstrous-feminine and the new Victorian psycho-physiology of consciousness in George Eliot's early novels; the monster-formed citizens of Dickensian and later dystopias; the killing of African Americans targeted as monstrous entities in US cities; the post-human anguish of a television zombie-world; the monstrous mutilations of a Spanish horror film; psychosocial aberration in Martin Millar's werewolf fiction; the demonization of the Other on the war-torn streets of Ireland; Derridean devouring sovereignty. Discursively correlated with different categories of body and mind, monstrosity, these essays argue, persists in taking many forms. Contributors are Elizabeth Hollis Berry, Niculae Gheran, Sarah Harris, Fiona Harris-Ramsby and Mubarak Muhammad, Michaela Markova, Kimberley McMahon Coleman, Judith Rahn, Cindy Smith and Marita Vyrgioti.

Interfaces are back, or perhaps they never left. The familiar Socratic conceit from the "Phaedrus," of communication as the process of writing directly on the soul of the other, has returned to center stage in today's discussions of culture and media. Indeed Western thought has long construed media as a grand choice between two kinds of interfaces. Following the optimistic path, media seamlessly interface self and other in a transparent and immediate connection. But, following the pessimistic path, media are the obstacles to direct communion, disintegrating self and other into misunderstanding and contradiction. In other words, media interfaces are either clear or complicated, either beautiful or deceptive, either already known or endlessly interpretable.

Recognizing the limits of either path, Galloway charts an alternative course by considering the interface as an autonomous zone of aesthetic activity, guided by its own logic and its own ends: "the interface effect." Rather than praising user-friendly interfaces that work well, or castigating those that work poorly, this book considers the unworkable nature of all interfaces, from windows and doors to screens and keyboards. Considered allegorically, such thresholds do not so much tell the story of their own operations but beckon outward into the realm of social and political life, and in so doing ask a question to which the political interpretation of interfaces is the only coherent answer.

Grounded in philosophy and cultural theory and driven by close readings of video games, software, television, painting, and other images, Galloway seeks to explain the logic of digital culture through an analysis of its most emblematic and ubiquitous manifestation - the interface.

The ability to preserve electronic evidence is critical to presenting a solid case for civil litigation, as well as in criminal and regulatory investigations. Preserving Electronic Evidence for Trial provides everyone connected with digital forensics investigation and litigation with a clear and practical hands-on guide to the best practices in preserving electronic evidence. Corporate management personnel (legal & IT) and outside counsel need reliable processes for the litigation hold - identifying, locating, and preserving electronic evidence. Preserving Electronic Evidence for Trial provides the road map, showing you how to organize the digital evidence team before the crisis, not in the middle of litigation. This practice handbook by an internationally known digital forensics expert and an experienced litigator focuses on what corporate and litigation counsel as well as IT managers and forensic consultants need to know to communicate effectively about electronic evidence. You will find tips on how all your team members can get up to speed on each other's areas of specialization before a crisis arises. The result is a plan to effectively identify and pre-train the critical electronic-evidence team members. You will be ready to lead the team to success when a triggering event indicates that litigation is likely, by knowing what to ask in coordinating effectively with litigation counsel and forensic consultants throughout the litigation progress. Your team can also be ready for action in various business strategies, such as merger evaluation and non-litigation conflict resolution.

This important study in ethnomusicology is an attempt by the author -- a musician who has become a social anthropologist -- to compare his experiences of music-making in different cultures. He is here presenting new information resulting from his research into African music, especially among the Venda. Venda music, he discovered is in its way no less complex in structure than European music. Literacy and the invention of nation may generate extended musical structures, but they express differences of degree, and not the difference in kind that is implied by the distinction between 'art' and 'folk' music. Many, if not all, of music's essential processes may be found in the constitution of the human body and in patterns of interaction of human bodies in society. Thus all music is structurally, as well as functionally, 'folk' music in the sense that music cannot be transmitted of have meaning without associations between people.

If John Blacking's guess about the biological and social origins of music is correct, or even only partly correct, it would generate new ideas about the nature of musicality, the role of music in education and its general role in societies which (like the Venda in the context of their traditional economy) will have more leisure time as automation increases.

Who counts as a woman? This question lies at the heart of many public debates about sex and gender today. While we increasingly recognise the desire of some to eliminate the sex binary in law, a particular boiling point emerges through conflicting demands over women's spaces. Which should govern access to these - sex or gender identity? Karen Ingala Smith, a veteran campaigner for women's and girls' rights, opts for the former. In this trenchant critique of inclusivity politics, she argues that we cannot ignore the wealth of evidence which shows that people of the female sex have a unique set of needs which are often not met by mixed-sex spaces. Drawing on her 30 years of experience in researching and recording men's violence against women and girls, she outlines how certain spaces, including refuges, benefit from remaining single sex - and what they stand to lose. Written with sensitivity and respect for all concerned, this book nevertheless dismantles the idea that we have reached a post-sex utopia.

Based on the study of a police organization in England, this book explores the role of social relations in the ways that people construct, mobilize, consume, and reconstruct meaning about wellbeing. Wellbeing is a powerful, institutionalized concept in police organizations across England and Wales. With the emergence of numerous policies, strategies, and practices that both explicitly and implicitly address wellbeing in the workplace, the concept has come to feature prominently. Wellbeing is addressed as an issue that needs to be understood intersubjectively by attending to the underlying social issues that shape how it is promoted or denied. After a theoretical exploration of police culture and wellbeing, the book traverses ethnographic data and captures insights from individuals across the organization's hierarchy. It explores what individuals perceive wellbeing to mean and how they make sense of the concept. The book reveals discernible ideological-laden tensions across the hierarchy in terms of wellbeing constructions. By exploring these tensions, there is a potential to understand the constructions of wellbeing and the resultant implications for practice. This book will be of interest to academics, researchers, and students in policing, criminology, criminal justice, leadership/management, organizational behaviour, and wellbeing. Given its empirical focus and applicability to practitioners, it will also be of interest to a range of non-academics, including police officers and leaders, public servants, private organizations, policymakers, and human resources professionals.

This open access book examines the various ways that shame, shaming and stigma became an integral part of the United Kingdom's public health response to COVID-19 during 2020. As the Covid-19 pandemic unfolded in 2020, it quickly became clear that experiences of shame, shaming and stigma dominated personal and public life. From healthcare workers insulted in the streets to anti-Asian racism, the online shaming of "Covidiots" to the identification of the "lepers of Leicester", public animus about the pandemic found scapegoats for its frustrations. Interventions by the UK government maximised rather than minimized these phenomena. Instead of developing robust strategies to address shame, the government's healthcare policies and rhetoric seemed to exacerbate experiences of shame, shaming and stigma, relying on a language and logic that intensified oppositional, antagonistic thinking, while dissimulating about its own responsibilities. Through a series of six case studies taken from the events of 2020, this thought-provoking book identifies a systemic failure to manage shame-producing circumstances in the UK. Ultimately, it addresses the experience of shame as a crucial, if often overlooked, consequence of pandemic politics, and advocates for a "shame sensitive" approach to public health responses. The open access edition of this book is available under a CC BY NC ND 4.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com Open access was funded by The Wellcome Trust.

This book focuses on Africa's challenges, achievements, and failures over the past several centuries using an interdisciplinary approach that combines theory and fact and evidence-based practices and interventions in public health, and argues that most of the health problems in Africa are not a result of scarce or lack of resources, but of the misconceived and misplaced priorities that have left the continent behind every other on the globe in terms of health, education, and equitable distribution of opportunities and access to (quality) health as agreed by the United Nations member states at Alma-Ata in 1978.

Approaching global health through a social justice lens, this text explores both established and emerging issues for contemporary health and wellbeing. Divided into two parts, the book introduces key concepts in relation to global public health, such as ethics, economics, health disparities, and globalisation. The second part comprises chapters exploring specific challenges, such as designing and implementing public health interventions, the role of social enterprise, climate change, sustainability and health, oral health, violence, palliative care, mental health, loneliness, nutrition, and embracing diverse genders. These chapters build on, and apply, the theoretical frameworks laid out in part one, linking the substantive content to broader contexts. Taking an inclusive, global approach, this is a key text for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of global health, public health, and medical sociology.

Approaching global health through a social justice lens, this text explores both established and emerging issues for contemporary health and wellbeing. Divided into two parts, the book introduces key concepts in relation to global public health, such as ethics, economics, health disparities, and globalisation. The second part comprises chapters exploring specific challenges, such as designing and implementing public health interventions, the role of social enterprise, climate change, sustainability and health, oral health, violence, palliative care, mental health, loneliness, nutrition, and embracing diverse genders. These chapters build on, and apply, the theoretical frameworks laid out in part one, linking the substantive content to broader contexts. Taking an inclusive, global approach, this is a key text for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of global health, public health, and medical sociology.

Social change in the twenty-first century is shaped by both demographic changes associated with ageing societies and significant technological change and development. Outlining the basic principles of a new academic field, Socio-gerontechnology, this book explores common conceptual, theoretical and methodological ideas that become visible in the critical scholarship on ageing and technology at the intersection of Age Studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Comprised of 15 original chapters, three commentaries and an afterword, the book explores how ageing and technology are already interconnected and constantly being intertwined in Western societies. Topics addressed cover a broad variety of socio-material domains, including care robots, the use of social media, ageing-in-place technologies, the performativity of user involvement and public consultations, dementia care and many others. Together, they provide a unique understanding of ageing and technology from a social sciences and humanities perspective and contribute to the development of new ontologies, methodologies and theories that might serve as both critique of and inspiration for policy and design. International in scope, including contributions from the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Australia, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Austria, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden, Socio-gerontechnology is an agenda-setting text that will provide an introduction for students and early career researchers as well as for more established scholars who are interested in ageing and technology.

This is the story of a professor of Medical Sociology, diagnosed with colon cancer. He undergoes the appropriate medical treatment. Passing through that trajectory, he realizes that things happen that he never read about in the professional literature. During his illness and rehabilitation he scribbles down notes about what is happening to him, what he is observing and what things do not tally with his knowledge of the sociological literature. This continuous connection of personal experience with academic literature is what makes this book such a powerful account of the 'everyday' life of a sick person. Recommended to teachers and students in the field of social health research; to everyone who works in health care, professionals as well as volunteers; and to men and women who themselves are experiencing a serious illness.

This book analyses the development of private healthcare in post-Independence Kolkata, India, and the rapid expansion of private nursing homes and hospitals from a historical and sociological perspective. It offers an examination of the changing pattern of the entire health care sector, which over recent decades has transformed itself to a profit-making commodity. The book explores the complexities of the health care services in Kolkata with special emphasis on the emergence, growth, role and the changing pattern of private health care organisations and the decline or degeneration of the services of public hospitals. Post-1947 India experienced the implementation of new developments in public health services, amongst others vertical programmes, primary health centers, family planning welfare programmes and community health volunteers. Examining the challenges in establishing a comprehensive health service system and the process of market forces in health care, the author investigates its linkages with policies of the welfare state. This book will be of interest to academics in the field of medical sociology, history of medicine and health and development studies and South Asian Studies.

"Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture" provides the first comprehensive overview of desire and pleasure in western sexual culture. It argues that both have always been seen as socially disruptive and morally dangerous and offers an entertaining account of the methods by which these attributes of sex were managed across the centuries from Classical Antiquity to the present day.

The book develops the hypothesis that, while expressed in very different social contexts, sexual pleasure has evoked very similar anxieties. The text draws on historical, cultural, sociological and contemporary sources and is easily accessible for both the general reader and students of gender and sexual culture. In addition to telling a story of its own, "Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture" examines lesser-known aspects of sexual history that invite further exploration by the interested reader. These range from sexual aestheticism in the 4th century AD and the sexual meaning of medieval church gargoyles, through to sexual training in the 1950s and 21st century sex holidays.

The book will provide a compelling read for both students of sexuality and lay readers who find the complexities of human sexuality a source of fascination.

This issue focuses on "radical interactionism," which recent emergence as an alternative perspective to conventional symbolic interactionism has sparked fierce debate in both North America and Europe. Lonnie Athens discusses the four fundamental differences between radical and conventional symbolic interactionism. The prominent scholars compare the relative insights offered not only between radical interactionism and symbolic interactionism, but between radical interactionism and feminism, dramaturgy, critical studies, and neo-pragmatism. Without exception, they found the radical interactionism revealed new and formidable insights that improved our general understanding of human group life and critical problems that arise during it. While some contributors believe that radical interactionism marks the development of a new and more vibrant form of interactionism which in due time will replace its much older and more conservative cousin, others believe that it only signals the need for traditional interactionists to finally start making some much-needed modifications in symbolic interactionism if they wish it to remain a viable sociological perspective in the 21st century.

This book addresses key issues regarding the nexus of work and family in society at the beginning of the 21st century. For many families, the "balancing act" brings rewards as well as concerns. Employers and governments struggle with whether and how to assist in achieving balance.
The work presents original research that addresses the challenges in meeting work and family obligations. Each chapter provides policy recommendations that many help achieve better work-family balance, changes in work-family attitudes, conditions leading to firms' adopting policies to support work-family balance, and studies of child outcomes in dual earner families.

This edited volume traces cultural appearances of disgust and investigates the varied forms and functions disgust takes and is given in both established and vernacular cultural practices. Contributors focus on the socio-cultural creation, consumption, reception, and experience of disgust, a visceral emotion whose cultural situatedness and circulation has historically been overlooked in academic scholarship. Chapters challenge and supplement the biological understanding of disgust as a danger reaction and as a base emotion evoked by the lower senses, touch, taste and smell, through a wealth of original case studies in which disgust is analyzed in its aesthetic qualities, and in its cultural and artistic appearances and uses, featuring visual and aural media. Because it is interdisciplinary, the book will be of interest to scholars in a wide range of fields, including visual studies, philosophy, aesthetics, sociology, history, literature, and musicology.

Black Culture and Experience: Contemporary Issues offers a holistic look at Black culture in the twenty-first century. It is a collection of work that creates a synergy among authors and leads to a valuable resource on contemporary issues. Part One examines institutional, societal, and political issues like identity politics; the Rooney Rule; prosperity gospel; inequality in the criminal justice system; the American dream; the future of Black and Africana studies; and President Obama's double consciousness. Part Two investigates social, cultural, and community issues such as the Affordable Care Act; Black women and obesity; Black men's experience in marriage and relationships; sexual decision making; interracial relationships; and cultural racism. Part Three explores media, pop culture, and technology issues including the rise of urban fiction; hip hop and feminism; race in Super Bowl commercials; the construction of Black Diasporic identities; Whiteness in Black-oriented films; Black masculinity in Django Unchained; and the power of Black Twitter. This anthology contains work from leading scholars, authors, and other specialists who have been brought together to highlight key issues in black culture and experience today. The goal is to help readers understand where we are and where we still need to go, what is working and what we still need to work on, what is right and what is still wrong.

From local bike-sharing initiatives to overhauls of transport infrastructure, mobility is one of the most important areas in which modern cities are trying to realize a more sustainable future. Yet even as politicians and planners look ahead, there remain critical insights to be gleaned from the history of urban mobility and the unsustainable practices that still impact our everyday lives. United by their pursuit of a "usable past," the studies in this interdisciplinary collection consider the ecological, social, and economic aspects of urban mobility, showing how historical inquiry can make both conceptual and practical contributions to the projects of sustainability and urban renewal.

The Routledge Handbook of Health and Media provides an extensive review and exploration of the myriad ways that health and media function as a symbiotic partnership that profoundly influences contemporary societies. A unique and significant volume in an expanding pedagogical field, this diverse collection of international, original, and interdisciplinary essays goes beyond issues of representation to engage in scholarly conversations about the web of networks that inextricably bind media and health to each other. Divided into sections on film, television, animation, photography, comics, advertising, social media, and print journalism, each chapter begins with a concrete text or texts, using it to raise more general and more theoretical issues about the medium in question. As such, this Handbook defines, expands, and illuminates the role that the humanities and arts play in the education and practice of healthcare professionals and in our understanding of health, illness, and disability. The Routledge Handbook of Health and Media is an invaluable reference for academics, students and health professionals engaged with cultural issues in media and medicine, popular representations of disease and disability, and the patient/professional health care encounter.