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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Cultural studies > General
The public image of genetics research has undergone a remarkable transformation since the 1950s, from a suspect brand of research tainted by eugenics to a thriving, well-funded, and "popular" field of biomedicine. Still, despite enormous scientific advances in DNA technology and its ability to sustain large areas of the science industry, social, legal, and popular opinion about genetics remains highly ambivalent. In Imagenation, historian of science Jose Van Dijck examines the role of images and imagination in popular representations fo the new genetics since the late 1950s. Taking us through a vast range of media--from general interest magazines to science fiction to public relations materials--he demonstrates how popular representations of genetics do not simply reflect the advancement of genetic technology. Instead, cultural accounts of genetics are taking on an important role in the very structure of scientific thinking, with many groups--environmentalists, feminists, entrepreneurs--influencing this process. From news stories of DNA strings escaping from our laboratories to the ongoing debates over bioethics, from James Watson and "The Double Helix" to the Human Genome Project, Van Dijck Portrays the "imaginary" tools of genetics as players in a theater of representation--a multilayered contest in which special interest groups and professional organizations mobilize images in a heated debate over the meaning of genetics. Compelling and insightful, Imagenation unravels this phenomenon, revealing how ideology shapes the cultural forms through which we make sense of scientific progress.
The Spectralities Reader is the first volume to collect the rich scholarship produced in the wake of the "spectral turn" of the early 1990s, which saw ghosts and haunting conjured as compelling analytical and methodological tools across the humanities and social sciences. Surveying the past twenty years from an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective, the Reader displays the wide range of concerns spectrality, in its diverse elaborations, has been called upon to elucidate. The disjunctions produced by globalization, the ungraspable quality of modern media, the convolutions of subject formation (in terms of gender, race, and sexuality), the elusiveness of spaces and places, and the lingering presences and absences of memory and history have all been reconceived by way of the spectral. A primer for the wide readership engaged with cultural interpretations of ghosts and haunting that go beyond the confines of the fictional and supernatural, The Spectralities Reader includes twenty-five groundbreaking texts by prominent contemporary thinkers, from Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak to Avery Gordon and Arjun Appadurai, as well as a general introduction and six section introductions by the editors.
This inescapably controversial study envisions, defines, and theorizes an area that Laura Wright calls vegan studies. We have an abundance of texts on vegans and veganism including works of advocacy, literary and popular fiction, film and television, and cookbooks, yet until now, there has been no study that examines the social and cultural discourses shaping our perceptions of veganism as an identity category and social practice. Ranging widely across contemporary American society and culture, Wright unpacks the loaded category of vegan identity. She examines the mainstream discourse surrounding and connecting animal rights to (or omitting animal rights from) veganism. Her specific focus is on the construction and depiction of the vegan body-both male and female-as a contested site manifest in contemporary works of literature, popular cultural representations, advertising, and new media. At the same time, Wright looks at critical animal studies, human-animal studies, posthumanism, and ecofeminism as theoretical frameworks that inform vegan studies (even as they differ from it). The vegan body, says Wright, threatens the status quo in terms of what we eat, wear, and purchase-and also in how vegans choose not to participate in many aspects of the mechanisms undergirding mainstream culture. These threats are acutely felt in light of post-9/11 anxieties over American strength and virility. A discourse has emerged that seeks, among other things, to bully veganism out of existence as it is poised to alter the dominant cultural mindset or, conversely, to constitute the vegan body as an idealized paragon of health, beauty, and strength. What better serves veganism is exemplified by Wright's study: openness, debate, inquiry, and analysis.
aBlending cinematic, literary, historical, and political analyses,
Watching Rape demonstrates that filmic representations of rape are
never only about gender and sexual violence, but are narrative
devices that also attempt to regulate such conflicts and boundaries
of power as race, nationality, and social class. Projansky makes
good on her bold claim that representations of rape are ubiquitous,
versatile, and utterly central to the history of cinema itself. A
scholarly tour de force, a feminist triumph. Two thumbs up!a aExciting and original. Sarah Projanskyas work on rape and
postfeminism is an important contribution to scholarship in film
and cultural studies, as well as womenas studies.a a"Watching Rape" is a compelling account of the role of the rape
in making meaning and re-inscribing inequalities within visual
media, and as such it is a necessary and valuable research
contribution. a aSarah Projanskyas work is distinctive for its theoretical
clarity and interdisciplinary feminist framework. She urges us to
think deeply about the ways in which media shape our understandings
of sexual violence. Watching Rape is a powerful, historically
grounded, incisive analysis of the representation of sexual
violence.a Looking at popular culture from 1980 to the present, feminism appears to be "over": that is, according to popular critics we are in an era of "postfeminism" in which feminism has supposedly already achieved equality for women. Not so, saysSarah Projansky. In Watching Rape, Projansky undermines this complacent view in her fascinating and thorough analysis of depictions of rape in U.S. film, television, and independent video. Through a cultural studies analysis of such films as Thelma and Louise, Daughters of the Dust, and She's Gotta Have It, and television shows like ER, Ally McBeal, Beverly Hills 90210, and various made-for-tv movies, Projansky challenges us to see popular culture as a part of our everyday lives and practices, and to view that culture critically. How have media defined rape and feminism differently over time? How do popular narratives about rape also communicate ideas about gender, race, class, nationality, and sexuality? And, what is the future of feminist politics, theory, and criticism with regard to issues of sexual violence, postfeminism, and popular media? The first study to address the relationship between rape and postfeminism, and one of the most detailed and thorough analyses of rape in 25 years, Watching Rape is a crucial contribution to contemporary feminism.
This collection of papers encourages social and biological scientists to question their presentations of African Americans and to recognize that afrocentricity is important in refocusing portrayals of African Americans. It contrasts the production of these cultural portrayals by the majority of the U.S. population with those by African Americans themselves. It shows the process of creating a racial identity as well as the historical background related to a new evaluation of what it is to be African American in the United States.
We typically take public space for granted, as if it has continuously been there, yet public space has always been the expression of the will of some agency (person or institution) who names the space, gives it purpose, and monitors its existence. And often its use has been contested. These new essays, written for this volume, approach public space through several key questions: Who has the right to define public space? How do such places generate and sustain symbolic meaning? Is public space unchanging, or is it subject to our subjective perception? Do we, given the public nature of public space, have the right to subvert it? These eighteen essays, including several case studies, offer convincing evidence of a spatial turn in American studies. They argue for a re-visioning of American culture as a history of place-making and the instantiation of meaning in structures, boundaries, and spatial configurations. Chronologically the subjects range from Pierre L'Enfant's initial majestic conceptualization of Washington, D.C. to the post-modern realization that public space in the U.S. is increasingly a matter of waste. Topics range from parks to cities to small towns, from open-air museums to airports, encompassing the commercial marketing of place as well as the subversion and re-possession of public space by the disenfranchised. Ultimately, public space is variously imagined as the site of social and political contestation and of aesthetic change.
Multicultural education has become one of the most widely discussed concepts in education today. Yet, at the same time, it is also one of the most misunderstood. Now, teachers, students and other interested parties can turn to the Dictionary of Multicultural Education to further their knowledge and understanding of this increasingly popular educational practice. As the authoritative reference work on this subject, the Dictionary includes detailed descriptions of more than 100 key words and phrases that are commonly used in the discussion of multicultural education at both the local school and national levels. Each entry begins with a simple, clear description of a concept or term and moves to a more in-depth discussion, using illustrative examples to bring the concept alive. Also included are brief biographical profiles of scholars, theoreticians and practitioners who have emerged as leaders in this field.
This book offers the first comparative discussion of variation in selected areas of structure in the dialects of Kurdish. The contributions draw on data collected as part of the project on Structural and Typological Variation in Kurdish and stored in the Manchester Database of Kurdish Dialects online resource, as well as on additional data sources. The chapters address issues in lexicon, phonology, and morpho-syntax including nominal case, tense and aspect categories, pronominal clitics, adpositions, word order (with special reference to post-predicate constituents) and connectivity and complex clauses. The materials that inform the analysis consist of a systematic questionnaire-based elicitation covering key features of variation in lexicon and morpho-syntax, and an accompanying corpus of free speech recordings, collected in over 120 locations across the Kurdish-speaking regions in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran and covering mainly the dialects of Northern and Central Kurdish (Kurmani-Bahdini and Sorani), with some consideration of Southern Kurdish. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in fields such as linguistics, linguistic typology, Iranian linguistics and linguistics of the Middle East, and dialectology.
Although family members sometime engage in monitoring as an extension of governmental surveillance, they also monitor each other, other families, and their own borders to preserve norms about what a family should be and what family members should do. Whether it is the seemingly benign surveillance of using baby monitors, the more obviously intrusive use of home drug tests on teenagers, or the way people in public feel free to judge and comment on the family composition of others, monitoring goes on all the time -- and even (or maybe especially) when there seems to be no monitoring going on at all.
This visionary book takes stock of the urgent challenges facing food chains globally and provides a critical evaluation of radical new thinking and perspectives on agricultural and food policy. Wyn Grant investigates the principal drivers of change in food and agriculture, including globalization, climate change, the structure of the industry, changing patterns of consumer demand and new technologies. Rethinking Agricultural and Food Policy provides a comprehensive account of the contemporary challenges impacting the food chain. Chapters explore the various barriers towards positive progress, exposing the deficiency of institutional architecture at a domestic and international level and examining how attempts to reform and revitalize it encounter inertia, embedded production structures, defenders of the status quo and vested interests. Proposing that a holistic, interdisciplinary approach is essential in making progress towards revitalizing policy and encouraging innovation in international governance, Wyn Grant calls for a new agenda to deliver real and necessary change and offer hope for the planet and its people. Using critical insights from natural and social science to uphold its calls for a holistic, integrated approach to agricultural and food policy, this timely book will be an essential read for policy makers, as well as students taking undergraduate or postgraduate courses in agriculture, food and the environment.
The eighteenth-century Enlightenment saw the birth of an era which sought legitimacy not from the past but from the future. No longer would human beings invoke the authority of tradition; instead, modern societies emerging in the West justified themselves by their success at increasing, through the application of scientific knowledge, human control over the world. Ever since this notion of modernity was formulated it has provoked intense debate. In this wide-ranging historical introduction to social theory, Alex Callinicos explores the controversies over modernity and examines the connections between social theory and modern philosophy, political economy and evolutionary biology. He offers clear and accesssible treatments of the thought of Montesquieu, Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment, Hegel, Marx, Tocqueville, Maistre, Gobineau, Darwin, Spencer, Kautsky, Nietzsche, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, Freud, Lukacs, Gramsci, Heidegger, Keynes, Hayek, Parsons, the Frankfurt School, Levi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault, Habermas and Bourdieu, and concludes by surveying the state of contemporary social thought. A remarkably comprehensive and lucid primer, Social Theoryis essential reading for students of politics, sociology and social and political thought.
Inspired by both Daniel Defoe's 'A Journal of the Plague Year' (1722) and 'The King', an anthology of the witty and provocative chess columns of the Dutch Grandmaster, Jan Hein Donner, Ray Keene here collects his thoughts and writings on the year 2020 - both in chess and the wider world. His reflections include the impact of Covid-19 on the popularity of chess, the remarkable influence of the Netflix series 'The Queen's Gambit', the growing army of teenage Grandmasters, the online pivot of chess competition and the emergence of chess entrepreneurs, such as World Champion Magnus Carlsen and Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura.. Like Donner, Ray uses chess as a metaphor for observations on art, culture and civilisation.
An in-depth examination of the different forms of privilege perpetuating inequality within American society In this era of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, inequality is at the forefront of American thought like never before. Yet many of the systems of privilege upholding the status quo remain unchanged. Many Americans who advocate a merit-based, race-free worldview do not acknowledge the systems of privilege which benefit them. Men remain at the top of the gender wage gap and white people are five times less likely to be stopped by police than their Black neighbors. White families can build lives using social and financial inheritances that have been denied to Black Americans and immigrants for centuries. Individual chapters focus on language, the workplace, the implications of comparing racism and sexism, race-based housing privilege, the dream of diversity and the cycle of exclusion, the rule of law and invisible systems of privilege, and the power of law to transform society. Twenty-five years since its first publication, Privilege Revealed is more relevant than ever. With a new preface and substantive foreword, this book offers readers important insight into the inequalities still pervading American society and encourages us all to confront our own relationship to these too often invisible privileges.
View the Table of Contents. "Way and Judy Chu have put together an excellent book on explorations into the lives of adolescent boys. The essays are rich in diversity, not only in the populations of boys studied, but also in research methodology and theoretical perspective."--"Choice" "Empirical research on the lives and behavior of adolescent boys
from a variety of ethnic and class backgrounds." "The volume explores the experiences of boys who have been
excluded from previous developmental research and also challenges
the existing stereotypes about boys." "Brings together a coherent and consistent body of literature on
a topic that is often relegated to a single chapter or afterthought
in similar books and edited volumes...."Adolescent Boys" challenges
the limited and often skewed male images perpetuated by the media,
superordinant male groupings, and Western men by giving voice to
adolexcent boys growing up in diverse cultures of boyhood." A flurry of best-selling works has recently urged us to rescue and protect boys. They have described how boys are failing at school, acting out, or shutting down emotionally. Lost in much of the ensuing public conversation are the boys themselves--the texture of their lives and the ways in which they resist stereotypical representations of them. Most of this work on boys is based primarily on middle class, white boys. Yet boys from poor and working class families as well as those from African American, Latino, and Asian American backgrounds need to be understood in their own terms and not just as a contrast to white or middle classboys. Adolescent Boys brings together the most up-to-date empirical research focused on understanding the development of boys from diverse racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. The authors show how the contexts of boys' lives, such as the schools they attend shape their identities and relationships. The research in this book will help professionals and parents understand the diversity and richness of boys' experiences.
The twentieth volume of Research in Consumer Behavior presents twelve chapters, selected from the best papers submitted at the 13th annual Consumer Culture Theory Conference held in Denmark in June 2018. Aligned with the conference's thematic emphasis on storytelling, the contributors' research stories open the eyes and minds of readers to thought-provoking ideas, theories, and contexts. This book will allow researchers and graduate students working in the area of consumer research and marketing to explore three narrative lines that were prevalent during the conference: 'Objects and their doings', 'Glocalization', and 'Constituting Markets'. The volume concludes with an awarded paper by Brown, who takes a critical look at the quality of storytelling in the CCT tradition and helps us learn from the great storytellers of the past.
The Carolina, Mariana and Marshall Islands have experienced world war, atomic weapons testing and varying brands of colonialism in the 20th century. Following the seizure of the islands from Japan, agencies of the US government sought to better possess and control the area through a series of developmental initiatives. Interdisciplinary in its approach, this text goes beyond the liberal discourse surrounding modernity to examine what economic development actually entailed. It explores in ethnographic terms how different groups of island people responded to development programmes in multiple, complex, layered and sometimes conflicting ways that reflected their own historical experiences and cultural understandings.
""Class Issues" reminds us that university intellectuals work in
knowledge factories; that the factories produce engines of
dominance; and that, therfore, sabotage has to be the order of the
day. The essays state their cases with elegance, with thoroughness,
and with economical precision. No one interested in addressing his
or her mite of effort to transforming the world can afford to
ingore this book." The university classroom has been turned into an intensely bitter battlefield. Conservatives are attacking the academy's ability to teach, and at times its very right to educate. As the dust begins to settle, the contributors to this volume weigh in with a constructive and wide-ranging statement on the progressive possibilities of teaching. This is, in many ways, a book for the morning after the PC Wars, when the shouting dies down and the imperatives of pedagogy remain. Asserting a complex, inter-related agenda for teachers and students, "Class Issues" is an anthology of essays on radical teaching. Leading scholars of literary and cultural studies, queer studies, ethnic studies and working-class literature examine the challenges that confront progressive pedagogy, as well as the histories that lie behind the achievements of cultural studies. "Class Issues" offers a plan for the construction of an alternative public sphere in the rapidly changing space of the classroom in the academy. "Class Issues" is a compilation of important new work on the
tradition of radical teaching as well as forceful suggestions for
the mobilization of radical consciousness.
In this broad condemnation of multiculturalism, the author works to uncover pernicious errors in the arguments of diversity's proponents and to sound a warning against the dire consequences for American culture if the tenets of political correctness are incorporated into our social structure. Schmidt begins by exposing multiculturalism, not as a movement aimed at expanding democratic ideals, but rather as a crypto-Marxist political ideology that seeks to import Marxist concepts into social and cultural institutions. Subsequent chapters then illuminate a number of dismaying trends: a tendency toward historical revisionism in multiculturalist arguments, the sly linguistic maneuvering and limits on speech that characterize political correctness, and the dismantling of the traditional image of the family unit-the primary building block of American society. Schmidt concludes with a rousing admonition to expel from our midst the latter-day Trojan horse that is multiculturalism. Casting a troubled glance over the list of social ills plaguing America today-besieged inner cities, divisive racial politics, diminishing educational standards, and rampant divorce and illegitimacy-we have cause to wonder whether the advocates of multiculturalism represent the solution or the source of the problem. In this rousing condemnation of the multiculturalist agenda, the author fixes an unflinching critical gaze on the subtle deceptions and wrongheaded conclusions at work in the arguments for cultural pluralism, moral relativism, and political correctness. An exhaustive and damning account of multiculturalism's wages and a compelling argument for the importance of traditional American values make this book essential reading for anyone concerned about our country's present plight and future prospects.
This collection examines the ways in which religion and literature are capable of renewing what the eminent German philosopher Jurgen Habermas refers to as 'the public sphere'. The essays range from close commentaries on particular texts ( King Lear, The Brothers Karamazov, 'Bartleby the Scrivener') to surveys of the careers of selected writers who have entered the public sphere (Elizabeth Gaskell, W.H. Auden, Raymond Carver, Sherman Alexie), to historical and theoretical examinations of various national and international public spheres.
During World War II the Japanese were stereotyped in the European imagination as fanatical, cruel, almost inhuman - an image reflected in most books and films about prisoner of war in the Far East. While the Japanese cetainly treated those they captured badly, behaving far worse to Chinese and native captives than to Europeans, the conventional view of the Japanese is unhistorical and simplistic. It fails to recognize that hte Japanese were acting at a time of supreme national crisis trial, at a particular period of their history, and that their attitudes were influenced by a combination of their perception of their own racial identity mixed with a powerful historical tradition. This collection of essays, by both western and Japanese scholars, aims to see the question from a historical viewpoint, and from both a western and Japanese perspective, looking at it in the light of both longer-term influences, notably the Japanese attempt to establish themselves as an honorary white race. The essays also examine particular instances. Conditions in the almost self-run camp at Changi contrasted remarkably with those on the Burma Railway, where disease and a failure to provide supplies caused terrible suffering. The book also addresses the other side of the question, looking at the treatment of Japanese prisoners in Allied captivity.
Reading Gramsci is a collection of essays by Francisco Fernandez Buey with a unifying theme: the enduring relevance of Gramsci's political, philosophical and personal reflections for those who wish to understand and transform 'the vast and terrible world' of capital. Reading Gramsci is of considerable biographical and philosophical interest for scholars and partisans of communism alike. Fernandez Buey distils Gramsci's intimate thinking on the relation between love and revolutionary engagement from Gramsci's personal correspondence; he reveals how Gramsci draws on both Marxism and Machiavellianism in order to formulate his conception of politics as a collective ethics; he retraces the trajectory of Gramsci's thinking in the Prison Notebooks, and elucidates Gramsci's reflections on the relation between language and politics. English translation of Leyendo a Gramsci, published by El Viejo Topo in 2001.
Globalization, it seems, either holds the promise of new horizons and new worlds, or trammels local cultures and produces uniformity. Here, Maria Koundoura strikes a singular path between these divergent views and maps the full terrain of our contemporary culture landscape. Reading world literature and engaging with contemporary critical methodologies, she explores what she calls transnational visions of language and culture, and analyses the politics of identity, representation, and cultural expression. She thus presents a history of the aesthetic of our moment in modernity, and situates that moment in the economics of the global culture market and the ethics of cultural translation. Offering a model for addressing key questions of contemporary culture, identity, and globalization, this book will be invaluable for all those interested in cultural and postcolonial studies, diaspora, and globalization studies, as well as world literature.
In the struggle for democratic reform, and in its ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the French Revolution represented a broad humanistic spirit that swept across Europe at the close of the 18th century. The Revolution fostered one of the largest and broadest debates in literary and cultural history, a war of ideas that encompassed philosophy, theories of history, the study of language, and the history of art. This debate is reflected in a large body of literature that extends well into the 19th century. The debate in England was particularly strong, and in 1789, the London Corresponding Society remarked that the French Revolution was the topic to which all thinking minds were drawn. During the 20th century, scholars have given much attention to the link between the Revolution and Romanticism. Within this volume, expert contributors examine the centrality of the French Revolution to English culture in the 18th and 19th centuries. The book offers a sweeping exploration of the diverse effects of the Revolution in verbal and visual art, poetry and prose, history and fiction, politics and religion, and philosophy and language theory. Among the figures discussed are Edmund Burke, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle. By analyzing a broad range of writers and artists who shaped and were shaped by the French Revolution, the volume dramatizes the scope and diversity of the debate, thus offering an interdisciplinary analysis of the debate as a whole and an emphasis on the extent to which all thinking minds were drawn to the topic. |
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