Latinos comprise the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States, and this interdisciplinary anthology gathers the scholarship of early career and senior Latina/o scholars whose work explores the varied and unique "latinidades, "or Latino cultural identities, of this group. Using an interdisciplinary perspective, the authors deploy various theoretical tools to examine the realities and lived experience of Latinas/o in the United States. While the editors of the book in their method of organization seek to present a wide panoramic view of the Latina/o condition, the authors of the individual essays use specific methodologies: empirical, ethnographic, linguistic, and literary and textual analysis along with cultural studies and other appropriate approaches.

Managing identity through biometric technology has become a routine and ubiquitous practice in recent years. From border control and asylum regulation to the management of social services and medical records, various fields are increasingly deploying biometric systems as a means of identity verification and authentication. The scope and nature of these systems are raising a host of concerns regarding the intensification of surveillance practices and the reduction of identity to a series of bio-data and algorithms.By analysing biometric systems as a biopolitical practice within the domain of borders, immigration and citizenship management, this book interrogates what is at stake in the merging of the body and technology for security and governance purposes. It draws on a number of critical theories, philosophies and empirical examples, offering a multi-level and timely analysis of the socio-political and ethical implications of biometric identity systems.

This book explores how the cultural process of making any disease a "plague" results in discrimination against certain groups, as it has for those with AIDS in America. Gina M. Bright here captures the discrimination produced by plague-making in her analysis and her portraits of the people she has cared for with AIDS over the past quarter-century.

The sudden collapse of the war left us in a daze. After the years of inhuman strain it was hard to ease off tension to the almost forgotten conditions of peace. I recall that ever to be remembered day, November 11th, 1918-Victory Day. In the early hours before noon I was in London, and my young son was with me. Everywhere was an atmosphere of anxiety, an unusual stillness. Men in little groups of two and three stood here and there, soldiers in larger numbers loitered or walked slowly along the pavements; girls and women waited at the doors of business houses and shops, where inside nobody seemed attending to the few customers. Everyone was waiting; there was an expectancy so great and so stirring that ordinary life had stopped. The last hour seemed endless in its slow passing.

Theorist Clifford Geertz's influence extends far beyond anthropology. Indeed the case could be made that he has been abandoned by anthropology and that his legacy has been transferred to a more diffuse community of scholars interested in interpretation. This volume reflects the breadth of his influence, looking at Geertz as a theorist rather than as an anthropologist. To date, there has been no impartial, comprehensive, and authoritative work published on this critical figure. Contributors include an interdisciplinary team of leading scholars investigating the three core components of contested legacy: theory, method, and writing.

If there's one thing that Americans have in common it's that the truth we seek is constantly being obscured. We are lied to. The lies come from commercials we watch, from politicians, from those like the tobacco company executives who swore that nicotine is not addictive, from fabrications suggesting that our children's lack of excelling on international tests somehow define us as second-class people, and from false statements declaring that American teachers are causal to the nation's educational problems. Unlike Jack Nicholson's angry declaration, "You can't handle the truth," as he played Colonel Nathan Jessup in the movie A Few Good Men, we think you can handle the truth. Therefore, this book is written. It's filled with stories and essays that tell the real truth about the plight of American education. Some of the stories will make you laugh, some make you cry. You will become angry, occasionally shocked. Each chapter will reveal deep problems and you will find yourself looking for easy answers. But there are none. What you will find are bold answers that will require the fighting spirit and courage of a nation. You will be challenged to join a "War worth Waging." We have not hesitated to identify, in addition to problems and bold solutions, the real villains, for there are villains. As the chapters undress them for you and expose their real identities, you will simultaneously be introduced to unsung heroes who teach in our nation's classrooms. They are heroes you will declare by book's end to be the cement that holds the nation together. They have never stopped teaching the skills and civility that the next generation needs to participate in and contribute to the perpetuation of the democracy. You will come to know, on a personal level, the American schoolteacher.

This book shows how research in linguistic pragmatics, philosophy of language, and rhetoric can be connected through argumentation to analyze a recognizably common strategy used in political and everyday conversation, namely the distortion of another's words in an argumentative exchange. Straw man argumentation refers to the modification of a position by misquoting, misreporting or wrenching the original speaker's statements from their context in order to attack them more easily or more effectively. Through 63 examples taken from different contexts (including political and forensic discourses and dialogs) and 20 legal cases, the book analyzes the explicit and implicit types of straw man, shows how to assess the correctness of a quote or a report, and illustrates the arguments that can be used for supporting an interpretation and defending against a distortion. The tools of argumentation theory, a discipline aimed at investigating the uses of arguments by combining insights from pragmatics, logic, and communication, are applied to provide an original account of interpretation and reporting, and to describe and illustrate tactics and procedures that can be used and implemented for practical purposes.. This book will appeal to scholars in the fields of political communication, communication in general, argumentation theory, rhetoric and pragmatics, as well as to people working in public speech, speech writing, and discourse analysis.

Strangely enough, while the pictures used to illustrate the most recent wave of protests for democracy in North Africa represent mass protest, research on social movements and democratization have rarely interacted. This volume aims to fill this gap by looking at episodes of democratization through the lens of social movement studies. Without assuming that democratization is always produced from below, the author singles out different paths of democratization by looking at the ways in which the masses interact with the elites, and protest with bargaining: eventful democratization, participated pacts and troubled democratization. The main focus is on the first of the paths: eventful democratization, that is cases in which authoritarian regimes break down following-often short but intense-waves of protest. Recognizing the particular power of some transformative events, the analysis locates them within the broader mobilization processes, including the multitude of less visible, but still important protests that surround them. Cognitive, affective and relational mechanisms are singled out as transforming the contexts in which dissidents act. In all three paths, mobilization of resources, framing processes and appropriation of opportunities will develop in action, in different combinations. The comparison of different cases within two waves of protests for democracy, in Central Eastern Europe in 1989 and in the Middle East and North Africa in 2011, allows the author to theorize about causal mechanisms and conditions as they emerge in mobilizations for democracy.

This book introduces the resources of contemporary social system theory, as pioneered by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann and associated theorists. Luhmann's theory is very different from the general systems approach that dominated sociological thought for several decades after the Second World War. Norms and functions are not seen as fundamental premises of social systems and social order. Rather meaning, communication, and observation are set into the core of social life and its analysis. Meaning is seen as a medium that couples psychic and social systems or consciousness and communication. Observation is described as the introduction of distinctions and selections, and communication is the basic operation that connects observations and thereby allows for the emergence of observers: persons, interaction systems, organizations, and functional subsystems of society, such as the economy, politics, law, and art. Society itself is conceived as the encompassing unity of all communication, a universal set of references that makes observation and communication possible. Modern system theory does not join the quest for essential variables such as norms, values, or institutions. It selects observations and depicts their connectivity, their potential for processing information, building expectations about meaning in the world, and for structuring social systems. Contemporary social systems theory tries to explain the probability of the improbable: that communication occurs and reproduces a universe of meaning in which observers may orient themselves. Social system theory incorporates fresh insights from cognitive biology, the philosophy of consciousness, phenomenology, distinction theory, socio-cybernetics, and constructivism to explain the emergence of society. The authors of Observing Society describe how the theory moves beyond traditional sociological paradigms that attempt to explain social order and understanding with presumptions of intersubjectivity, collective conscience, communicative rationality, or normative consensus. Observing Society: Meaning, Communication, and Social Systems concisely outlines how social system theory offers sociologists an integrated set of practical and general analytical concepts, a promising agenda for scholarly inquiry, and a cutting-edge description of modern society. Using clear illustrations and effectively citing original material previously unavailable in English, Lee and Brosziewski carefully explain the logic of drawing distinctions to make observations, the concepts of meaning and communication, the forms of communication media such as speech and writing, the evolution of forms of organizing society, the functional differentiation of modern systems, and how social system theory informs sociological research and methodology. This book will hold significant relevance for collections in sociology, philosophy, German studies, European studies, and culture and media studies.

This edited volume brings together a series of contributions exploring the socio-cultural and psychological representation of peace and conflict. It ventures into areas of the humanities and social sciences not typically foregrounded in peace studies, such as psychology, sociology, media studies, cultural studies, history, and geography.

This book offers a comprehensive study of the complexities of newborn survival in resource-poor regions, using the state of Bihar (India) as a case study. It provides important lessons for other low-performing countries, in similar socioeconomic contexts, where newborn survival is a major challenge. The volume opens with a brief account of the trends and regional variations in neonatal mortality. The empirical verification of socio-cultural, economic and health system barriers and the state interventions that affect newborn survival are subsequently explored. Innovative strategies are then proposed to scale up maternal newborn and child health (MNCH) services and improve neonatal health outcomes. Addressing this issue through appropriate policy action is essential to achieving Sustainable Development Goal-3, "Good Health and Well-being". This book will therefore appeal to public health scholars, professionals and policymakers interested in improving outcomes in low-income regions.

Research on gender, sex, and crime today remains focused on topics that have been a mainstay of the field for several decades, but it has also recently expanded to include studies from a variety of disciplines, a growing number of countries, and on a wider range of crimes. The Oxford Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Crime reflects this growing diversity and provides authoritative overviews of current research and theory on how gender and sex shape crime and criminal justice responses to it. The editors, Rosemary Gartner and Bill McCarthy, have assembled a diverse cast of criminologists, historians, legal scholars, psychologists, and sociologists from a number of countries to discuss key concepts and debates central to the field. The Handbook includes examinations of the historical and contemporary patterns of women's and men's involvement in crime; as well as biological, psychological, and social science perspectives on gender, sex, and crimal activity. Several essays discuss the ways in which sex and gender influence legal and popular reactions to crime. An important theme throughout The Handbook is the intersection of sex and gender with ethnicity, class, age, peer groups, and community as influences on crime and justice. Individual chapters investigate both conventional topics - such as domestic abuse and sexual violence - and topics that have only recently drawn the attention of scholars - such as human trafficking, honor killing, gender violence during war, state rape, and genocide. The Oxford Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Crime offers an unparalleled and comprehensive view of the connections among gender, sex, and crime in the United States and in many other countries. Its insights illuminate both traditional areas of study in the field and pathways for developing cutting-edge research questions.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This authored monograph analyses the determining factors of societal evolution: the interaction between individuals and the resulting relationship, which the author calls the "Social Bond". The book aims at providing a better understanding of social dynamics and social interaction, and the author develops two models which provide interesting new insights. The target audience primarily comprises academics working in the field of social complexity and related fields, but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students alike.

The re-emergence of China as a world power promises to be the signal economic, political, cultural, and social development of the 21st century. In the face of its rise, fine grained accounts of the shape and texture of this new China are both timely and necessary. Navigating the Aspirational City forwards a theory of contemporary Chinese urban educational culture that focusses on the influence of dominant conceptions of "the good citizen" and the material environment upon parents as they pursue their childrearing projects. The book provides a description of the beliefs and practices of urban Chinese parents as they "educate" their children. These beliefs and practices are placed in relation to a historical chain of ideas about how to best educate children, as well as within the urban context in which they are produced and reproduced, renovated, and transformed. Beginning with a history of revolutionary "orders of worth" culminating in the "aspirational cite," the book details the shifting standards that define the "human capital" conditions of possibility of a developed modern economy. It goes on to describe a set of policies and practices known as san nian da bianyang by which the whole of one particular city, Shijiazhuang, has been demolished, re-built, and re-ordered. Contemporary China is, the author contends, no less revolutionary than Mao's, noting that parents' beliefs and practices articulate with the present ideational and material context to produce what appears, at times, to be radical transformation and, at others, remarkable stability.

Knowledge And Global Power is a ground-breaking international study which examines how knowledge is produced, distributed and validated globally.

The former imperial nations – the rich countries of Europe and North America – still have a hegemonic position in the global knowledge economy. Fran Collyer, Raewyn Connell, João Maia and Robert Morrell, using interviews, databases and fieldwork, show how intellectual workers respond in three Southern tier countries, Brazil, South Africa and Australia. The study focuses on new, socially and politically important research fields: HIV/AIDS, climate change and gender studies.

The research demonstrates emphatically that ‘place matters’, shaping research, scholarship and knowledge itself. But it also shows that knowledge workers in the global South have room to move, setting agendas and forming local knowledge.

Non-State Regulatory Regimes explores how the concept of regulation continues to evolve. The focus is placed on those forms of regulation that are different from state regulation or present alternatives to state regulation. Departing from an analysis of the goals and policies of the traditional regulatory state, the emergence of 'regulation by other means' is examined. The approach is interdisciplinary encompassing various perspectives be they legal, political, international relations-based, economic, or sociological. The task of comprehending non-state regulation is a daunting one. To date, a number of essays already exist, which concentrate on specific aspects of the issue. In comparison to these essays, this study is innovative in that it applies a holistic view. Linking public policy approaches to regulation, it draws a theoretical path to understanding the emergence and persistence of non-state jurisdictional assertions and regulatory regimes.

At the core, it doesn't matter what you believe governs the fate of man and Earth, what matters is that humans, as a global society, build a future that is sustainable and peaceful. This is the ultimate human evolutionary development, this is our challenge. By tracing our existence from where we began to what we have become today, this book explores the evolution and, should we continue on our current path, the subsequent possible obsolescence of human beings. Far from a doomsday tome, The Fishbowl Principle challenges readers to expand their worldview. We need to change our measure of a successful life from simply existing to prospering. The authors refuse to accept that life as we exist today is "as good as it gets." We argue that humans have reached a fragile tipping point; and that instead of fragmenting and isolating ourselves in a future of despair, we can and will work together to an even higher apex. As a human race, we examine what can be achieved if we look to our similarities instead of our differences. If we could harness communication as a powerful and cost effective tool to bring us together and educate ourselves in a way that fosters sustainable and responsible population growth, the positive transformation to our lives would be immeasurable. Whether you exist today as a peasant in a tribal setting or as an urban dweller we explore fostering a sense of global community based on common ground, not just niche existence. We present tangible alternatives and pose thought-provoking questions. Our vision is a collaborative one, and requires your participation. A path back to evolution starts with you, and includes all of us.

The impact of religion on family and reproduction is one of the most fascinating and complex topics open to scholarly research. The linkage between family and religion has received no systematic treatment on a comparative basis, either in the social sciences or in historical studies. This book provides new insights into the relationships between religion and demography during the crucial period of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Apart from providing a wealth of descriptive information on family life and fertility in different national and religious settings, the major strength of the book lies in its conceptual insights. The book will attract and stimulate readers at the advanced undergraduate or at the graduate level in history, religious studies, womena (TM)s studies, family studies, social demography, sociology, and anthropology due to its subject matter (moral issues related to fertility decline and family change played an important role in processes like secularisation, and religious secessions in the19th and 20th century), its analytical approach (all chapters make use of micro-level data on family and family size and use comparable statistical methods specifically suited for these kinds of data), and its theoretical orientation (the chapters explicitly focus on the variety of mechanisms via which religions had an effect on family life and fertility). The book is truly cross-cultural, showing the similarities as well as the differences in the positions of the various churches on matters important for reproduction in Western Europe, the US and Canada in the period 1850-1950. The consideration of the causes of variations in family size in the past provides arefreshing perspective on contemporary effects of religion on reproductive behaviour and the family.

"This volume successfully promotes an agenda for research on the complex and diverse historical relationships between fertility, identity, community and religion." Simon Szreter, Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge

"These well-researched and lucidly argued papers will provide important reading for all those interested in the religious history of the nineteenth century." Hugh McLeod is Professor of Church History at the University of Birmingham

"This is a very valuable new resource for scholars, both established and new, to understand the role of religious institutions in family and demographic behavior and the ways in which those behaviors change across long periods of time." Arland Thornton, Director, Population Studies Center, University of Michigan

"This book shows also that modern demographic and social history is able to revive the past in ways unthinkable only a generation ago." Massimo Livi-Bacci is Professor of Demography, University of Florence, and honorary president of the "International Union for the Scientific Study of Population."

In recent decades, globalization and regional integration have brought significant economic and demographic changes in East Asia, including rising economic inequality, growing population movements within and across borders, and the emergence or renewed geopolitical significance of cultural and linguistic minority populations. These trends have coincided with significant changes in family formation, dissolution, and structures. How have these changes played out in the diverse educational systems of East Asia? In what innovative ways are East Asian governments addressing the new demographic realities of their student populations? This volume offers a snapshot of key educational stratification issues in East Asian nations, and their evolution in conjunction with changing student populations. Scholars of Japan, China, and Korea in this volume address issues ranging from curricular adaptations to globalization, to persisting and new forms of educational stratification, to new multiculturalism in educational policy. In addition, authors consider the ways that migration is shaping education in the city-states of Hong Kong and Singapore. Collectively, the pieces in this volume represent a first attempt to investigate national responses to critical regional trends.

Why is teacher education policy significant - politically, sociologically and educationally? While the importance of practice in teacher education has long been recognised, the significance of policy has only been fully appreciated more recently. Teacher education in times of change offers a critical examination of teacher education policy in the UK and Ireland over the past three decades, since the first intervention of government in the curriculum. Written by a research group from five countries, it makes international comparisons, and covers broader developments in professional learning, to place these key issues and lessons in a wider context.