Ethnographic inquiry serves as a unique educational resource that is accessible to students and teachers of all economic and social classes and therefore well suited to building democratic communities in the 21st Century. This book is about teachers, students and parents in the Republic of Kazakhstan who opened new educational directions and democratic possibilities for themselves through a series of ethnographic studies about their local communities. By unfolding practical experiences of teachers and students with ethnographic study, this book builds and expands understanding about education and democracy across five points of view: Renewing professional development and building academic knowledge through ethnographic inquiry Acquiring democratic living through ethnographic study of participatory, caring citizenship Connecting democratic ways of life with ethnographic study of identity formation in diverse communities Building knowledge about democratic perspectives through reflexive reading and writing about ethnographic inquiry Building meaningful education at the intersections of ethnographic inquiry, literacy practices and theorizing about local communities The authors propose that teacher and student-led ethnographic inquiries develop educational experiences that enrich educators' professional growth and provide innovative research opportunities for them and their students that generate up-to-date academicknowledge, which can be used to inform course offerings, design lessons and address state policy mandates.

For much of its history, human population growth increased at a glacial pace. The demographic rate only soared about 200 years ago, climaxing in the period 1950-2000. In that 50-year span, the population grew more than it had in the previous 5000 years. Though these raw numbers are impressive, they conceal the fact that the growth rate of population topped out in the 1960s. The apparent population boom may be approaching a population bust, despite our coexistence with more than seven billion people. In On the Cusp, economist Charles Pearson explores the meaning of this population trend from the arc of demographic growth to decline. He reviews Thomas Malthus's famous 1798 argument that human population would exceed the earth's carrying capacity, and explains why this surfaces periodically when birth rates strongly exceed 2.1 children per household. Analyzing population trends through dual lenses - demography and economics - Pearson examines the potential opportunities and challenges of population decline and aging. In many industrialized countries, the combination of an aging population and considerable food security may call for policies that boost fertility, immigration, and worker participation, reform pension schemes, and ease concern over moderating rates of population and economic growth. Sharp and occasionally funny, Pearson's research has thought-provoking implications for future public policies. Pearson ends his analysis with a mildly hopeful conclusion, noting that both the rich and the poor face a new demographic order. Bold and comprehensive, general readers and students alike will find On the Cusp an informative and engaging read.

By comparing Germany, France, the UK and the USA this study explores how governments have tackled the increased pressure of financing state pensions. Specifically, it looks at the approach of each of these countries to raising the age of entitlement in order to understand the ways in which this policy was introduced in different countries.

A step-by-step guide to genealogical research for students of British American descent or those interested in British Americans.

Internal migration serves as one of the key contributing factors to population change involving not only change in the numbers of people, but also a change in composition and structure of local populations. Technologies for Migration and Population Analysis: Spatial Interaction Data Applications addresses the technical and data-related side of studying population flows and provides a selection of substantive case studies and applications to exemplify research currently being carried out. With expert international contributors currently working in the field, this authoritative book allows readers to better understand interaction data and ways knowledge of population flows can be put to use.

This book analyzes the family and residential trajectories of men and women across the twentieth century, which are placed in a long-term generational perspective and in the historical context where they played out. It brings together a set of studies based on data from the Biographies et Entourage (Life Event Histories and Entourage) survey conducted by the Institut National d'Etudes Demographiques (INED) on a representative sample of nearly 3,000 residents of the Paris region born between 1930 and 1950. Inside, readers will discover an insightful analysis of the family that moves away from such traditional concepts as the household or main residence and proposes new ones like the entourage and the residential system. This innovative approach to the family network describes an affective and residential proximity that takes into account the relatives and close friends who have played or continue to play a role in an individual's life. The book first presents a detailed analysis of the Biographies et Entourage survey respondents' parental universe and proposes a practical approach to the notion of parenthood that reveals the family and non-family resources available to individuals. Next, it describes the evolution of the respondents' family networks, both in and beyond the household, and details how these family circles shape their subjective judgments during childhood, adolescence, and adult life. Coverage then goes on to examine the family ties of older adults, the role of grandparents and step-families, the importance of family spaces including often frequented places, and inter-generational family solidarity. Families extend well beyond the walls of the home. Interpersonal relations are constructed throughout the life course and in all the settings where they play out. This book takes this new family reality into account and traces its dynamics across time and space. It provides essential tools for researchers looking to conduct life event history surveys and to develop innovative areas of research in the social sciences.

At the end of the 19th century, two famous predictions were advanced for the coming 20th century: while Le Bon prophesied that the coming century would have been the age of crowds, Tarde replied that the new century would have been the age of publics. Even in retrospect, it is not easy to tell who was right. This book proposes a historical-conceptual journey into the cluttered social formations that have remained outside of mainstream sociology. In particular, it reviews urban crowds, mediated publics, global masses, population, the sovereign people and the multitude. By doing so, it questions the image of the individual and addresses the question: 'What is the building block of the social?'. Imitation, contagion, suggestion and other phenomena of circulation within multiplicities put the idea of the individual as the building block of the social under strain. The notions of transformation and phase transition are explored as possible alternative views.

The core of the research reported in this study was a survey of men and women 55 years and older sampled from a comprehensive list of residents. The authors asked questions about social networks, control over household assets, household composition, life satisfaction, and subjective health, among other things. The social network questions had been used in an earlier study done in Kentucky. Nearly everything else had been developed for the Delhi study. The findings were similar to those in the earlier study: the size of people's networks does not decline materially until they are older (80 plus). Age itself did not seem that important, but health was crucial. Persons who reported they were healthy had larger networks.

As one might expect, joint family life has great impact on the nature of social life among older people. This has to do with the big difference in the situation of men and women in India. In addition to being patrilineal kin groups, joint families are dominated by male economic interests. The males as a collective group inherit property. Women have much less control of household assets. This ethnographic fact appeared very clearly in the answers to questions about participation in household decision making. High involvement in decisions, which the authors construed as a measure of power, spilled over into other aspects of the social aging process. Persons who were powerful in their households tended to have large networks, better subjective health, and much higher life satisfaction. They also tended to be men. The women tended to have small networks, low life satisfaction, lower subjective health, and less power. These differences between men and women were all substantial and highly significant. Gender is an extraordinarily important factor in the outcomes of social aging processes in India.

As economic and demographic conditions change, and technology advances, world leaders are becoming increasingly concerned with the future of health care. This comprehensive volume brings together North American and European experts in demographics, public administration, management, and health sciences to examine the challenges confronting health care personnel and systems in the industrialized countries. Following an overview of the general problems and methods of health care planning, contributors discuss such crucial topics as changes in the health status of populations; the impact of an aging population on health care systems; the prospects for reorganizing health care systems; the effects of new technology and drugs on health care; and the future of health care financing.

This book highlights historical and current perspectives on population issues in the Bengali-speaking states of India (i.e., West Bengal, Tripura, Assam) and Bangladesh and explores three core population dynamics: fertility, mortality-morbidity and development. Furthermore, it presents a selection of revealing cases from area-specific micro-studies, mainly conducted in West Bengal and Bangladesh. The book covers various demographic and health issues in these two regions, which are similar in terms of several sociocultural aspects, yet dissimilar in terms of their policies and programs. Adopting an integrated approach that combines various disciplines and perspectives, it explores highly topical issues such as social inequality, religious difference and mental health. The book is intended for a broad readership interested in population studies, sociology and development, including academics, researchers, planners and policymakers.

This book proffers a new theory of the radical possibilities of contemporary postcolonial feminist writings from Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, and the Caribbean, against what can be described as "actually-existing colonialisms." These writers include prominent and other less-known postcolonial women writers such as Tsitsi Dangarembga, Louise Erdrich, Aurora Levins Morales, Rosario Morales, Esmeralda Santiago, Raymonda Tawil, Michelle Cliff, and Rigoberta Menchu. Negotiating the contradictions among gender, nation, and globalization, postcolonial women writers construct extimate subjectivities that mark their excessive locations in the social field through the dialectical relation between the intimate and the external, the intimately or internally external, articulating these contradictions within the larger history and narratives of anti-colonial internationalist struggle for liberation and emancipation. Grounded in a commitment to the future of the postcolonial nation and the project of decolonization and liberation within the ever-encroaching, neocolonial global capitalist system, postcolonial women's narratives of displacing offer not only an alternative mode of ideological critique of scripted and commonly-inherited discourses of identity, home, culture that obfuscate the fundamental social antagonism, but also ways of changing them through practices of radical politics. The book thus charts four intersecting, dialogic strategies, by which postcolonial women writers produce extimate subjectivities: travel, unhomeliness, multiple and shifting subject positions, and transnational alliances. First, specific strategies of travel, voluntary and involuntary, within glocal networks of dispossession, displacement, and labor migration that foreground their extimate locations as internally external. Second, tactics of unhomeliness that uncover traces of the foreign, and elsewhere, in the edifice of the familiar that serve as the basis for interrogating dominant discourses of belonging. Third, techniques of multiple and shifting subject positions that recognize the excessive location of the extimate subject, in order to unravel not only the contingency of the subject's ontic properties, but also her locations in the interplay of oppression and privilege. And fourth, strategies for building political solidarity with transnational and transethnic communities of struggle that are grounded in the concrete Universality of the excluded communities. This book bears witness to the radical possibility in contemporary postcolonial feminist writing, and promises a way out of the impasse of the current culturalization of politics in the humanities that has resulted from the uncritical celebration of hybridity and the concomitant emphasis on diaspora, postnationalism, and cosmopolitanism in dominant discourses of postcolonial, ethnic, and transnational studies.

This book examines the profound demographic transformation affecting China, India, and Indonesia, where 40% of the world's people live. It offers a systematic, comparative approach that will help readers to better understand the changing social and regional recomposition of the population in these regions. The chapters present a detailed investigation and mapping of regional trends in mortality, fertility, migration and urbanization, education, and aging. Throughout, the analysis carefully considers how these trends affect economic and social development. Coverage also raises global, theoretical questions about the singular ways in which each of these three countries have achieved their demographic transition. As the authors reveal, demographic trends seem to be somewhat linear and anticipatable, providing Asia's three demographic giants and their governments a formidable advantage in planning for the future. But the evolution of human mobility in China, India, and Indonesia, closely intertwined as it is with changing economic conditions, appears less predictable and ranks high among the major challenges to demographic knowledge in the coming decades. Offering an insightful look into the components, implications, and regional variations of a changing population, this book will appeal to social scientists, demographers, anthropologists, sociologists, epidemiologists, and specialists in Asian studies.

This book deals with macro and micro aspects of population change and their inter-face with socio-economic factors and impact. It examines theoretical notions and pursues their empirical manifestations and uses multidisciplinary approaches to population change and diversity. It investigates the organic nature of the relationships between socio-economic factors and population change and the feedback loops that affect socio-economic organisation and behaviour. The book brings together material often scattered in a number of sources and disciplines that helps to understand population change and their socio-economic aspects. In addition to dealing with the more conventional factors in population dynamics in the form of fertility, mortality and migration, the book examines socio-economic forces that influence them. It discusses population evolving attributes that affect population characteristics and social and behaviour and impact on the environment. Further, it deals with social organisation and pathways that lead to different social and economic development and standards of living of diverse populations.

By bringing together top-notch demographers, sociologists, economists, statisticians and public health specialists from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America to examine a wide variety of public and private issues in applied demography, this book spans a wide range of topics. It evaluates population estimates and projections against actual census counts and suggests further improvement of estimates and projection techniques and evaluation procedures; new techniques are proposed for estimating families and households and particular attention is paid to the much-discussed topic of access to health care. Coverage extends to factors influencing health status and elder abuse, child bearing and labor market analysis and the effects of education on labor market outcomes of native white American and immigrant European populations.

Methodologically rigorous and pragmatically useful, "Emerging Techniques in Applied Demography "also examines a wide variety of public and private issues under the field of applied demography. It provides a broad overview of research topics and also reflects substantial development in the field of applied demography. It also bridges the gap between theory and research by providing several examples of work of distinguished applied demographic.

This volume examines two distinct low fertility scenarios that have emerged in economically advanced countries since the turn of the 20th century: one in which fertility is at or near replacement-level and the other where fertility is well below replacement. It explores the way various institutions, histories and cultures influence fertility in a diverse range of countries in Asia, Europe, North America and Australia. The book features invited papers from the Conference on Low Fertility, Population Aging and Population Policy, held December 2013 and co-sponsored by the East-West Center and the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs (KIHASA). It first presents an overview of the demographic and policy implications of the two low fertility scenarios. Next, the book explores five countries currently experiencing low fertility rates: China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and South Korea. It then examines three countries that have close to replacement-level fertility: Australia, the Netherlands and the United States. Each country is featured in a separate chapter written by a demographer with expert knowledge in the area. Very low fertility is linked to a number of conditions countries face, including a declining population size. At the same time, low fertility and its effect on the age structure, threatens social welfare policies. This book goes beyond the technical to examine the core institutional, policy and cultural factors behind this increasingly important issue. It helps readers to make cross-country comparisons and gain insight into how diverse institutions, policies and culture shape fertility levels and patterns.

During the past two decades, one of the most significant political and social changes has been the transfer of urban political leadership from aging ethnic-dominated political machines to coalitions led by blacks in cities such as Detroit, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Newark, and New Orleans. Bette Woody's analysis of modern urban government examines the political transformation of the 1970s and 1980s in the context of the failures of machine politics, traditional reforms, and racial policies of the prior two decades. Also discussed is the rise of neighborhood-based political coalitions to support black candidates, business elite support that these new leaders acquired, and the aggressive reform platforms they developed. In analyzing possibilities and strategies for current reform Woody focuses on five black mayors of big cities. A detailed case study of the success and failure of reform during Kenneth Gibson's administration in Newark reveals the importance of reorganizing city agencies and tax and budget structures in successful innovation.

This book provides an overview of multiple facets of ageing and its evolving dynamics in various Indian states. It elaborates on key dimensions like health, dependence and disability, as well as living arrangements for the elderly. Drawing on information from National Sample Surveys to offer readers a broader and richer understanding of the evolving demographic reality in India, the book addresses a range of detailed policies and programmes for the elderly in India. Given its scope, the book is essential reading for students and researchers in the fields of sociology, demography, economics and development studies. It also offers a valuable reference guide for anyone engaged in planning and policy formulation for social security, welfare of the aged or mainstreaming ageing concerns.

A companion to the ALA-award-winning Retrospective Bibliography of American Demographic History (1989), this volume includes literature on American demographic history published from 1984 to 1994. It covers such topics as marriage and fertility; health, sickness, and mortality; immigration, settlement, and cultural patterns; and family and its structures, roles and values (including both gender and sexuality issues). It also cites works showing the broad intersections between population matters and such economic, political, and social phenomena as war, oppression, government policy, elections, labor stereotype, discrimination, and cross-cultural contact or relations. The bibliography organizes and describes citations to the rich historical literature on the ordinary life experiences of Americans, such as marriage, childbearing, health, migration, and ethnicity, and how these fundamental phenomena have been interconnected with the events of headline history. The book provides multiple points of access, through the detailed contents and through indexes of place, ethnicity, and topic.

Using longitudinal data from the Swiss Household Panel to zoom in on continuity and change in the life course, this open access book describes how the lives of the Swiss population have changed in terms of health, family circumstances, work, political participation, and migration over the last sixteen years. What are the different trajectories in terms of mobility, health, wealth, and family constellations? What are the drivers behind all these changes over time and in the life course? And what are the implications for inequality in society and for social policy? The Swiss Household Panel is a unique ongoing longitudinal survey that has followed a large sample of Swiss households since 1999. The data provide the rare opportunity to go beyond a snapshot of contemporary Swiss society and give insight into the processes in people's lives and in society that lie behind recent developments.

This book provides an overview of the health of developing nations in the early twenty-first century. The basic assumption is that the health of a population is not independent of broader demographic trends, and does follow the health transition model. The coverage is broad, ranging from health transition in developing countries, to the health of women, to an analysis of morbidity. Population health is an essential component of human and social development. As both a means and an end of development, health lies at the heart of underdevelopment, and ranks first on the list of international priorities. The WHO slogan 'Health for all in 2000' reflects the spirit of a more general movement in favor of health promotion throughout the world. But the developing world is far from reaching this aim. The health of populations has improved in developing regions but there are still deep inequalities, and serious problems remain, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. After reviewing the core concepts of population health, the book examines health transition in developing countries, a process that has resulted in a double burden of diseases. A discussion of mortality in developing countries serves to highlight the high rates of child mortality in these regions. The book devotes a full chapter to women's health, and its chapter-length analysis of morbidity highlights the double burden weighing down developing populations and concludes with an analysis of health systems in developing countries.

Handbook of the Economics of Population Aging synthesizes the economic literature on aging and the subjects associated with it, including social insurance and healthcare costs, both of which are of interest to policymakers and academics. These volumes, the first of a new subseries in the Handbooks in Economics, describe and analyze scholarship created since the inception of serious attention began in the late 1970s, including information from general economics journals, from various field journals in economics, especially, but not exclusively, those covering labor markets and human resource issues, from interdisciplinary social science and life science journals, and from papers by economists published in journals associated with gerontology, history, sociology, political science, and demography, amongst others.

Japan's Diversity Dilemmas: Ethnicity, Citizenship, and Education reveals how Japanese society is now in the midst of dramatic transformation brought on by demographic change and globalization. Foreigners are coming to Japan and many more will come in the near future to meet the demands of an economy that needs workers to compensate for an extremely low birth rate. The ramifications of this influx of foreigners into a society that has based its identity on a mythical ethnic purity are enormous. This book examines the effects of globalization on both new and older ethnic communities. It shows the ways in which minorities, in particular Koreans, are changing their conceptions and practices regarding nationality. It explores issues of human rights and emerging conceptions of citizenship in Japan. It also looks at how forces of globalization are affecting the state ideology of homogeneity and how a new image of diversity and multiculturalism is slowly developing. Several authors focus their attention on implications for education in citizenship education, ethnic education, and international education. of diversity that impact Japan as a nation in three areas: ethnicity, citizenship, and education. As the population diversifies, the linking of ethnicity and citizenship is being challenged and education is a battleground where these struggles occur. This collection of papers by an interdisciplinary group of authors helps readers to understand Japan's evolving conceptions of the nation and its attempts to balance tensions of unity and diversity. 'Japan's Diversity Dilemmas looks at precisely the kind of issues that need examination and discussion, as Japan stands on the cusp of potentially huge demographic and social changes. This collection of studies will enrich and inform classroom and public discourse and those who follow these issues will find this book essential. -Sharon Noguchi, San Jose Mercury News and former Fulbright Fellow, University of Tokyo