In this pathbreaking collections of essays, Canada-based Chinese scholar Simin Li explores the latest insights into information, knowledge, political communication, and identity in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and their neighbors, friends, and adversaries. Discourses of Asian Societies follows the social dynamics of these East Asian nations and reflects their recent political discourses and civil practices, grouped into four themes: memory and diaspora, civil practice and discourse in China, political discourses in Hong Kong, and youth identity and nationalism in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The theme of memory and diaspora uses interpretive narratives to present, in one study, the motivations of five Chinese immigrants to leave their homeland. Data was collected from Zhihu, the Chinese version of the popular internet site Quora, as used in Singapore, Canada, Brazil, Finland, and Australia. The second study explores how international students enrolled in Taiwan's universities relieved homesickness by searching for information online. The book's appreciation of civil practice and discourse emerges from a study of how a Chinese rural library developed under the leadership of a non-government organization and an analysis of the relations between a think tank's research and social agenda, as presented in its publications and related news reports. The third theme's focus on Hong Kong uses Facebook to observe an opinion leader's routine communication and dissemination of political issues. A supplementary study assesses opinion leaders' online behavior during legislative council elections. Finally, the book offers an understanding of modern youth through a comparative study of expression and performance in Taiwan and Hong Kong, via social media and a more traditional comparative analysis of the similarities and differences of national groups of young people via big data.

This book grasps the duality between opportunities and risks which arise from children's and adolescents' social media use. It investigates the following main themes, from a multidisciplinary perspective: identity, privacy, risks and empowerment. Social media have become an integral part of young people's lives. While social media offer adolescents opportunities for identity and relational development, adolescents might also be confronted with some threats. The first part of this book deals with how young people use social media to express their developing identity. The second part revolves around the disclosure of personal information on social network sites, and concentrates on the tension between online self-disclosure and privacy. The final part deepens specific online risks young people are confronted with and suggests solutions by describing how children and adolescents can be empowered to cope with online risks. By emphasizing these different, but intertwined topics, this book provides a unique overview of research resulting from different academic disciplines such as Communication Studies, Education, Psychology and Law. The outstanding researchers that contribute to the different chapters apply relevant theories, report on topical research, discuss practical solutions and reveal important emerging issues that could lead future research agendas.

This third edition of a classic urban sociology text examines critical but often-neglected aspects of urban life from a social-psychological theoretical perspective. Symbolic interaction is among the most central theoretical paradigms in sociology and the theory that most thoroughly attends to how individuals give meaning to their world-in this case, how city dwellers interpret and respond to their daily experiences as urbanites. This thoroughly updated edition of Being Urban: A Sociology of City Life remains true to this particular theoretical angle of vision-the symbolic interactionist approach-focusing on specific topics that are relatively neglected in other urban sociology texts, and that lend themselves to the kind of social-psychological analyses that define the distinctive conceptual core of the authors' efforts. After the first two chapters supply readers with theoretical foundations of urban sociology, the next four chapters describe the various ways that individuals experience and make sense of key aspects of urban life. The final section-also composed of four chapters-addresses strategically chosen urban institutions and related processes of social change. Specific subject areas covered include sports, everyday public life, tolerance for diversity, women in cities, urban politics, and the arts. Readers will learn about how order is maintained in public urban places, understand why cities naturally breed a tolerance for diversity that may not be so easily achieved in less urban settings, and appreciate the delicate political and economic tensions between cities and their surrounding suburbs. Provides a complete analysis of the important social psychological dimensions of urban life that are often overlooked Supplies a comprehensive description of the 19th-century theoretical roots of urban sociology Enables readers to see concretely how theories are "applied" to illuminate the operation of a range of urban cultures, processes, and structures Considers a number of topics that are likely to resonate with readers personally, such as alternative approaches to the concept of "community," the daily organization of city life, and the phenomenon of urban tolerance of diversity Includes an up-to-date, new chapter on the arts and urban life

Terrorism threatens to destroy the world, corruption runs rampant, and natural resources are being depleted. Will these problems ever be solved? If events continue on their current course, these issues could destroy us. It is imperative that we take steps to understand evolutionary natural selection and the processes that have shaped world affairs over the past forty thousand years. Only by learning about social evolution and how ideologies have shaped societies will we be able to play active roles in trying to solve society's problems. Author Charles Brough covers topics such as basic behavior, the development of the first patriarchal system, barbarism and the rise of religions, and possible alternatives to Western civilization. Learn why the green revolution is falling behind, the implications of climate change, and how lagging energy supplies will affect the world. This social approach to studying evolution and humanity is different than anything you've ever encountered. You must be willing to understand the function that ideologies serve without believing in any of them to gain a deeper perspective on what may be The Last Civilization.

Education has long been viewed as a vehicle for building community. However, the critical role of education and schools for constructing community resistance is undermined by recent trends toward the centralization of educational policy-making (e.g. racial profiling new laws in the US-Arizona and Texas; No Child Left Behind and global racism), the normalization of "globalization" as a vehicle for the advancement of economic neo-liberalism and social hegemony, and the commodification of schooling in the service of corporate capitalism. Alternative visions of schooling are urgently needed to transform these dangerous trends so as to reconstruct public education as an emancipatory social project. Teaching for Global Community: Overcoming the Divide and Conquer Strategies of the Oppressor examines these issues among related others as a way to honor and re-examine Freirean principles and aim to take critical pedagogy in new directions for a new generation. The goal is to build upon past accomplishments of Paulo Freire's work and critical pedagogy while moving beyond its historical limitations. This includes efforts that revisit and re-evaluate established topics in the field or take on new areas of contestation. Issues related to education, labor, and emancipation, broadly defined and from diverse geographical context, are addressed. The theoretical perspectives used to look at these emerge from critical pedagogy, critical race theory, critiques of globalization and neoliberalism, marxist and neo-marxist perspectives, social constructivism, comparative/international education, postmodernism indigenous perspectives, feminist theory, queer theory, poststructuralism, critical environmental studies, postcolonial studies, liberation theology, with a deep commitment to social justice.

On a chilly, gray autumn afternoon in 1984, a patrolman was dispatched to an inner-city tenement in Auburn, Maine to investigate the report of a possible fire. What he found inside the building's smoke-filled, second-story apartment was not a fire but something far more horrifying -- the charred body of a 4-year-old girl, Angela Palmer, who had been stuffed into the oven of a kitchen stove and cooked to death. The discovery traumatized the community and shocked the country. The ensuing murder prosecution of the youngster's mother, Cynthia Palmer, and her boyfriend, John Lane, cast a searching light into the shadows of a secret world in which children and women suffer violence and sexual predation at the hands of those who are supposed to love and protect them.

This two-volume set examines the process of integration of rural society and the establishment of the modern state in China. It attempts to transcend general policy claims by analysing China's rural governance within the state's integration of rural society over the course of the twentieth century. Drawing on contemporary examples of state integration while observing the particular background of the Chinese context, this set systematically examines the entire process of the rural reconstruction of China over the course of the 100 years since the period of the late Qing Dynasty, while analysing the special characteristics of each period as well as current societal trends in the Chinese countryside. The first volume explores state penetration of the countryside and the transformation of the rural population from the point of view of politics, labour and resources, administration, and institutional integration. The second volume examines contemporary state integration via the economic activities of traditional rural societies, alongside fiscal, cultural, social, and technological integration. The conclusion summarizes three characteristics that are evident in the process of rural integration and the establishment of the modern state in China. The two volume set will be essential reading for scholars and students in Chinese Studies, Political Science, Rural Studies, and those who are interested in the rural reconstruction of China in general.

A process through which skills, knowledge, and resources are expanded, capacity building, remains a tantalizing and pervasive concept throughout the field of anthropology, though it has received little in the way of critical analysis. By exploring the concept's role in a variety of different settings including government lexicons, religious organizations, environmental campaigns, biomedical training, and fieldwork from around the globe, Hope and Insufficiency seeks to question the histories, assumptions, intentions, and enactments that have led to the ubiquity of capacity building, thereby developing a much-needed critical purchase on its persuasive power.

A process through which skills, knowledge, and resources are expanded, capacity building, remains a tantalizing and pervasive concept throughout the field of anthropology, though it has received little in the way of critical analysis. By exploring the concept's role in a variety of different settings including government lexicons, religious organizations, environmental campaigns, biomedical training, and fieldwork from around the globe, Hope and Insufficiency seeks to question the histories, assumptions, intentions, and enactments that have led to the ubiquity of capacity building, thereby developing a much-needed critical purchase on its persuasive power.

In the early twenty-first century, trauma is seemingly everywhere, whether as experience, diagnosis, concept, or buzzword. Yet even as many scholars consider trauma to be constitutive of psychological modernity or the post-Enlightenment human condition, historical research on the topic has overwhelmingly focused on cases, such as World War I or the Holocaust, in which Western experiences and actors are foregrounded. There remains an urgent need to incorporate the methods and insights of recent historical trauma research into a truly global perspective. The chapters in Traumatic Pasts in Asia make just such an intervention, extending Euro-American paradigms of traumatic experience to new sites of world-historical suffering and, in the process, exploring how these new domains of research inform and enrich earlier scholarship.

Can a complex subject like tax compliance be handled in such a simple manner? Sibichen K Mathew is successful in presenting his in-depth study on what makes people pay taxes or what prevents them from paying in a very interesting style. The Author takes us through the history, the economics and the politics of taxation to dissect the interconnected issues related to tax evasion and tax enforcement. He forcefully argues that the economic models are unable to fully explain the behaviour of taxpayers. For, if the tax laws are complex, the human mind is much more complex to yield to the economic models. His arguments are supported by data on attitudes, perceptions and experience of taxpayers, many of whom declare themselves to be tax evaders. The author also analyzes the sociological and economic causes and consequences of tax evasion and tax enforcement in the global context. The author has also briefly referred to the tax challenges thrown up by the integrated world economy. The solution offered is scaling up of international cooperation on a significant scale. The insights gained from these incisive analyses have enormous implications for policy makers as well as tax administrators all over the world. The taxpayers, tax practitioners and the students of social sciences would also find this book enriching.

The Book of the Courtier, Baldassare Castiglione's classic account of Renaissance court life, offers profound insight into the refined behavior which defined the era's ruling class. The courtly customs and manners of Italy to a great extent characterized the Renaissance, which elevated art and expression to new heights. Baldassare Castiglione published this book with the intention of chronicling the manners, customs and traditions which underpinned how courtiers, nobles, and their servants, behaved. Although ostensibly a book of etiquette and good conduct, Castiglione's treatise carries enormous historical value. He derived his observations directly from the many gatherings and receptions conducted by society's elite. Conversations with the officials, diplomats and nobility of the era further enhanced the accuracy of this book, imbuing it with an authenticity seldom seen elsewhere.

Racial history has always been the thorn in America's side, with a swath of injustices--slavery, lynching, segregation, and many other ills--perpetrated against black people. This very history is complicated by, and also dependent on, what constitutes a white person in this country. Many of the European immigrant groups now considered white have also had to struggle with their own racial consciousness.

In A Great Conspiracy against Our Race, Peter Vellon explores how Italian immigrants, a once undesirable and "swarthy" race, assimilated into dominant white culture through the influential national and radical Italian language press in New York City. Examining the press as a cultural production of the Italian immigrant community, this book investigates how this immigrant press constructed race, class, and identity from 1886 through 1920. Their frequent coverage of racially charged events of the time, as well as other topics such as capitalism and religion, reveals how these papers constructed a racial identity as Italian, American, and white.

A Great Conspiracy against Our Race vividly illustrates how the immigrant press was a site where socially constructed categories of race, color, civilization, and identity were reworked, created, contested, and negotiated. Vellon also uncovers how Italian immigrants filtered societal pressures and redefined the parameters of whiteness, constructing their own identity. This work is an important contribution to not only Italian American history, but America's history of immigration and race.

There is a profound crisis in the United States' foster care system, Jill Duerr Berrick writes in this expertly researched, passionately written book. No state has passed the federally mandated Child and Family Service Review; two-thirds of the state systems have faced class-action lawsuits demanding change; and most tellingly, well over half of all children who enter foster care never go home. The field of child welfare has lost its way and is neglecting its fundamental responsibility to the most vulnerable children and families in America.
The family stories Berrick weaves throughout the chapters provide a vivid backdrop for her statistics. Amanda, raised in foster care, began having children of her own while still a teen and lost them to the system when she became addicted to drugs. Tracy, brought up by her schizophrenic single mother, gave birth to the first of eight children at age fourteen and saw them all shuffled through foster care as she dealt drugs and went to prison. Both they and the other individuals that Berrick features spent years without adequate support from social workers or the government before finally achieving a healthier life; many people never do. But despite the clear crisis in child welfare, most calls for reform have focused on unproven prevention methods, not on improving the situation for those already caught in the system. Berrick argues that real child welfare reform will only occur when the centerpiece of child welfare - reunification, permanency, and foster care - is reaffirmed.
Take Me Home reminds us that children need long-term caregivers who can help them develop and thrive. When troubled parents can't change enough to permit reunification, alternative permanency options must be pursued. And no reform will matter for the hundreds of thousands of children entering foster care each year in America unless their experience of out-of-home care is considerably better than the one many now experience. Take Me Home offers prescriptions for policy change and strategies for parents, social workers, and judges struggling with permanency decisions. Readers will come away reinvigorated in their thinking about how to get children to the homes they need.

Using quantitative research, this volume investigates the characteristics, problems and trends of the automobile society in China's mega cities and large cities. It also addresses topics related to cars and cities, traffic safety and cars' consumption. China has experienced more than 30 years of rapid economic development, and people's living conditions have greatly improved. One of the symbols of this is family-car ownership, which has increased year by year. China is rapidly becoming an automobile society like North America. But China has huge population and limited urban space, and most of the cities are deteriorating environmentally. Added to this are the low degree energy self-sufficiency and people's lack of awareness of traffic rules, all of which have brought various social problems, such as traffic congestion, lack of parking spaces, air pollution, energy shortage and frequent accidents. The volume presents a series of studies examining the characteristics and problems of China's automobile society development from the perspective of sustainable development. The reports in the volume are both academic and highly readable, making it an interesting resource for researchers and general readers alike. It offers insights into the trends and problems of private cars in China, as well as observations on China's social change through the unique medium of cars.

In this book, a celebration of the work of the sociologist Peter Dickens serves as the catalyst for exploring the relationship between human 'internal nature' (our health and psychological well-being) and 'external nature' (the environment on which we depend and which we collectively transform). Across contributions from Ted Benton, James Ormrod, Kate Soper, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, Graham Sharp, James Addicott, Kathryn Dean and Peter Dickens himself, the book draws attention to alienation associated with the promotion of different knowledges in late capitalist production. But it also highlights the possibilities for generating less alienated relations with our environment in the future. As well as discussing the philosophical and theoretical issues involved, the book contains contemporary case studies of ultra-processed food, satellite farming, computerised thinking and dark tourism.

The Boys' Brigade arrived in Southern Rhodesia in 1948, with initial efforts being very localised. Momentum increased with the influx of post war immigrants from Britain and South Africa. By the early 1970s The Boys' Brigade Rhodesia was at its strongest numerically, but the civil war years preceding independence in 1980, decimated the organisation in the rural areas, especially in Victoria province where it was at its strongest. The following years were particularly hard for The Boys' Brigade but, by the late 1980s, membership was on the increase again. The current political and economic situation has severely affected the organisation's ability to continue as it had in the past and the future of uniformed youth work in Zimbabwe remains unknown.The achievements of The Boys' Brigade are recorded in this book, which has been meticulously researched, in consultation with many past and present members. The history book is a formal record of events which took place, including detailed appendices of every known Company, all the Queen's Badge and Founder's Badge awards and includes a photo gallery of past office bearers.

Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences, Eighth Edition, presents the extraordinary growth of research on aging individuals, populations, and the dynamic culmination of the life course, providing a comprehensive synthesis and review of the latest research findings in the social sciences of aging. As the complexities of population dynamics, cohort succession, and policy changes modify the world and its inhabitants in ways that must be vigilantly monitored so that aging research remains relevant and accurate, this completely revised edition not only includes the foundational, classic themes of aging research, but also a rich array of emerging topics and perspectives that advance the field in exciting ways. New topics include families, immigration, social factors, and cognition, caregiving, neighborhoods, and built environments, natural disasters, religion and health, and sexual behavior, amongst others.

The matsutake mushroom continues to be a highly sought delicacy, especially in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cuisine. Matsutake Worlds explores this mushroom through the lens of multi-species encounters centered around the matsutake's notorious elusiveness. The mushroom's success, the contributors of this volume argue, cannot be accounted for by any one cultural, social, political, or economic process. Rather, the matsutake mushroom has flourished as the result of a number of different processes and dynamics, culminating in the culinary institution we know today.