The guiding theme of the book is a traditional institution of Tajik culture: mahalla - neighborhood. For centuries it has sustained the existence of Tajik culture, and in times of the greatest religious persecution in the USSR it has helped Islam to survive. In this book the author does not limit himself to the description of mahalla and the explanation of its social functions; a significant part of the book is constituted by a comparison of mahalla with the concept of civil society existing in contemporary Western culture. For this reason, the book examines differences between Eastern and Western cultures, in which the specificity of the first is collectivism, and the second individualism. The author's considerations are based on two pillars: firstly, he has great knowledge on theoretical literature and field studies while secondly an important role has been played by the fact that he has spent a large part of his life as a resident of mahalla in Tajikistan before beginning his studies in the West. This very fact has allowed him to meet Western civil society as an observer. Precisely, the experience of living in these different societies permits the author to formulate his own opinions and conclusions, sometimes surprising to the reader.

"Harlem Heyday" vividly describes the special magic of Harlem's 'Heyday Years' - from the thirties to the seventies - which left a singular and enduring imprint on the world of entertainment. The author, son of the guiding spirit of the Apollo Theatre and witness to the enchantment and excitement of these years, recounts many amusing anecdotes about the singers, dancers, musicians and comedians who performed there and at the Lafayette. He follows the evolution of their art and describes how the early pioneers paved the way for the black superstars of today. The Apollo Theatre was just another uptown variety house when Frank Schiffman and Leo Brecher took over the old "Hurtig and Seamon" in 1935. This was the birth of a unique institution in American cultural history. Almost every black entertainer in modern history has, at one time or another, strutted across the stage of the Apollo. Legendary performers like Billie Holliday, Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, Nat 'King' Cole, and Charlie 'Bird' Parker, as well as acclaimed modern entertainers like Lena Horne, Richard Pryor, Stevie Wonder, Flip Wilson, and Diana Ross and the Supremes are all part of the colourful and dramatic story of the Apollo. This book is heavily illustrated with photographs of the stars of the 'uptown' theatres and choice memorabilia, including vintage theatre programs and newspaper advertisements. There are chapters detailing the history of Harlem, jazz, the blues and gospel music, and dance and comedy at the Apollo.

The America of the near future will look nothing like the America of the recent past.America is in the throes of a demographic overhaul. Huge generation gaps have opened up in our political and social values, our economic well-being, our family structure, our racial and ethnic identity, our gender norms, our religious affiliation, and our technology use.Today's Millennials,well-educated, tech savvy, underemployed twenty-somethings,are at risk of becoming the first generation in American history to have a lower standard of living than their parents. Meantime, more than 10,000 Baby Boomers are retiring every single day, most of them not as well prepared financially as they'd hoped. This graying of our population has helped polarize our politics, put stresses on our social safety net, and presented our elected leaders with a daunting challenge: How to keep faith with the old without bankrupting the young and starving the future.Every aspect of our demography is being fundamentally transformed. By mid-century, the population of the United States will be majority non-white and our median age will edge above 40,both unprecedented milestones. But other rapidly-aging economic powers like China, Germany, and Japan will have populations that are much older. With our heavy immigration flows, the US is poised to remain relatively young. If we can get our spending priorities and generational equities in order, we can keep our economy second to none. But doing so means we have to rebalance the social compact that binds young and old. In tomorrow's world, yesterday's math will not add up.Drawing on Pew Research centre's extensive archive of public opinion surveys and demographic data, The Next America is a rich portrait of where we are as a nation and where we're headed,toward a future marked by the most striking social, racial, and economic shifts the country has seen in a century.

The majority of Americans live in suburbs and until about a decade or so ago, most suburbs had been assumed to be non-Hispanic White, affluent, and without problems. However, recent data have shown that there are changing trends among U.S. suburbs. This book provides timely analyses of current suburban issues by utilizing recently published data from the 2010 Census and American Community Survey to address key themes including suburban poverty; racial and ethnic change and suburban decline; suburban foreclosures; and suburban policy.

The economic consequences of changing demographics are of as much significance now as when this book was first published. The book covers not only changes in population size and age-composition, but also factors not included in the word 'declining' - such as increased life expectancy. Part 1 examines how estimates of future populations are made, and what the position is in the UK. It serves as a basis for Part 2, which discusses the developments in each of the more important parts of our economic life, without exaggerating the influence of the population factor.

This unique and inexpensive book provides a demographic and economic history of urban America over the last 65 years. The growth and decline of most northern cities is contrasted with the steady growth of western and southern cities. Various urban government policies are explored, including federal, state, and local policies. There is a chapter focusing on Detroit and its rapid decline toward bankruptcy and its recent strategies to slow recovery. The final two chapters speculate on what's next for urban America and gives suggestions for stimulating growth.

This unique and inexpensive book provides a demographic and economic history of urban America over the last 65 years. The growth and decline of most northern cities is contrasted with the steady growth of western and southern cities. Various urban government policies are explored, including federal, state, and local policies. There is a chapter focusing on Detroit and its rapid decline toward bankruptcy and its recent strategies to slow recovery. The final two chapters speculate on what's next for urban America and gives suggestions for stimulating growth.

Demography has always mattered in conflict, but with conflict increasingly of an inter-ethnic nature, with sharper demographic differences between ethnic groups and with the spread of democracy, numbers count in conflict now more than ever. This book argues for and develops a framework for demographic engineering which provides a fresh perspective for looking at political events in countries where ethnicity matters. It asks how policies have been framed and implemented to change the demography of ethnic groups on the ground in their own interests. It also examines how successful these policies have been, focusing on the cases of Sri Lanka, Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland and the USA. Often these policies are hidden but author Paul Morland teases them out with skill both from the statistics and documentary records and through conversations with participants. Offering a new way of thinking about demographic engineering ('hard demography' versus 'soft demography') and how ethnic groups in conflict deploy demographic strategies, this book will have a broad appeal to demographers, geographers and political scientists.

First published in 1992, this book explores the efforts to counteract the high maternal and infant death rates present between the end of the nineteenth century and the Second World War. It looks at the problem in five different continents and shows the varying approaches used by the governments, institutions and individuals in those countries. Contributors display how policy and practice have been shaped by the structure of maternity services, nationalism, the conflict of colonization and cultural factors. In doing so, they illustrate how welfare policy and funding were moulded throughout the world in the times considered.

Poor, But Sexy: Reflections on Berlin Scenes offers readers a varied cross-section of the city's scenes, providing a prismatic view of one of Europe's mythical cultural capitals. The authors gathered here address a range of topics, including Turkish gay clubs, queer filmmaking, record labels, the legendary Russendisko, electronic music festivals, the city's famous techno scene, the clandestine dimensions of its nighttime club culture, and the fraught emergence of the Mediaspree. With the shifting context of post-Wende Berlin its backdrop, this collection puts into relief an electic array of case studies, presenting to readers interested in exploring urban issues a number of critical and analytical perspectives on the city's cultural life as it moves into the twenty-first century. Poor, But Sexy is an important contribution to the critical analysis of the cultural spaces in the city, and allows readers access to one of the few scholarly overviews of Berlin's varied cultural life available in English.

The Rhizome of Blackness is a critical ethnographic documentation of the process of how continental African youth are becoming Black in North America. They enter a "social imaginary" where they find themselves already falling under the umbrella of Blackness. For young Africans, Hip-Hop culture, language, and identity emerge as significant sites of identification; desire; and cultural, linguistic, and identity investment. No longer is "plain Canadian English" a site of investment, but instead, Black English as a second language (BESL) and "Hip-Hop all da way baby!" (as one student put it). The result of this dialectic space between language learning and identity investment is a complex, multilayered, and "rhizomatic third space," where Canada meets and rubs shoulders with Africa in downtown Toronto, Vancouver, or Montreal in such a way that it produces its own "ticklish subject" and pedagogy of imaginary and integrative anti-racism.

Dimitrios Dendrinos, an expert in the application of non-linear dynamics and chaos theory to the subject of urban and regional dynamics, focuses here on fundamental issues in population growth and decline. He approaches the topic of urban growth and decline within a global system perspective, viewing the rise and fall of cities, industries and nations as the result of global interdependencies which lead to unstable dynamics and widespread dualisms. Professor Dendrinos provides valuable insights into the evolution of human settlements and considers the possible futures open to the giant cities of the world.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of African demography over the past 50 years, profiling demographic changes, trends, patterns, and consequences in the region. It includes a demographic analysis of emerging issues in African population studies, such as conflict, poverty, reproductive health, gender, social services delivery, refugees, and HIV/AIDS, and examines the social context of African demography and population issues through in-depth socioeconomic analysis of the demographic trends and their consequences in the continent.

Despite rapidly decreasing rates of population growth caused by reduced fertility in the majority of world regions, demographers are predicting that the world's population will still double by the year 2050. The question is therefore no longer the traditional one of whether the planet can support so many people, but how to provide a sustainable future for ten billion individuals. Quantitative problems have become ethical ones. Coping with Population Challenges addresses these issues in the context of international debate and agreements since the first World Population Plan of Action in 1974 to the 20-year Programme of Action adopted at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994. The author describes how the Programme of Action focalizes on women's issues, reproductive choice and the notion of the individual. However, she identifies a number of important but neglected areas of the debate that the Programme failed to address and brings to light some of the inconsistencies that need to be resolved if the Programme is to be implemented. The author also looks at the underlying ethical dimension of all choices relating to the population issue and suggests measures and machinery for giving effect to states' commitments, including reformulating problems and defining the appropriate economic framework for solutions. The book is an excellent introduction for the non-specialist to a very topical debate, and a useful reference for researchers. LOUISE LASSONDE is director of the Fondation du Devenir, Geneva. In her capacity as anthropologist and demographer, Dr Lassondc has worked closely with the United Nations and non-governmental organizations in many countries. Originally published in 1997

This book visualizes mortality dynamics in the Lexis diagram. While the standard approach of plotting death rates is also covered, the focus in this book is on the depiction of rates of mortality improvement over age and time. This rather novel approach offers a more intuitive understanding of the underlying dynamics, enabling readers to better understand whether period- or cohort-effects were instrumental for the development of mortality in a particular country. Besides maps for single countries, the book includes maps on the dynamics of selected causes of death in the United States, such as cardiovascular diseases or lung cancer. The book also features maps for age-specific contributions to the change in life expectancy, for cancer survival and for seasonality in mortality for selected causes of death in the United States. The book is accompanied by instructions on how to use the freely available R Software to produce these types of surface maps. Readers are encouraged to use the presented tools to visualize other demographic data or any event that can be measured by age and calendar time, allowing them to adapt the methods to their respective research interests. The intended audience is anyone who is interested in visualizing data by age and calendar time; no specialist knowledge is required. This book is open access under a CC BY license.

Research Methods in Africana Studies is a major contribution to the discipline of Africana studies and social science involving people of African descent in general. This textbook is the first of its kind, offering instruction on how to conduct culturally relevant critical research on Africana communities in the American context, in addition to the African diaspora. It contains a collection of the most widely used theories and paradigms designed for exploring, explaining, and advancing Africana communities through science. The relevance, strengths, and weaknesses of every major method of data collection are explained as they relate to the lived experiences of the Black world. It stands alone as the only textbook that details empirical methods in the service of the collective advancement of Africana peoples.

Research Methods in Africana Studies is a major contribution to the discipline of Africana studies and social science involving people of African descent in general. This textbook is the first of its kind, offering instruction on how to conduct culturally relevant critical research on Africana communities in the American context, in addition to the African diaspora. It contains a collection of the most widely used theories and paradigms designed for exploring, explaining, and advancing Africana communities through science. The relevance, strengths, and weaknesses of every major method of data collection are explained as they relate to the lived experiences of the Black world. It stands alone as the only textbook that details empirical methods in the service of the collective advancement of Africana peoples.

This book presents empirical observations and theoretical thinking of the fundamental changes in the Chinese economy. It starts with a warning of the arrival of the Lewis Turning Point, which is empirically proven by disappearance of surplus labor force and a rapid increase in wages of unskilled workers. It further reveals that China's rapid population-aging trend is diminishing the demographic dividend that has kept China's economic growth rate high. Subsequently, it touches upon employment challenges that arise after reaching the Lewis Turning Point, further propelling urbanization, a balanced regional development, and so on. Finally, it introduces middle-income trap which is one of the biggest challenges China is facing, followed by recommendation of policies for the Chinese government to tackle the challenges ahead.This book should be of great interest to graduates, undergraduates, researchers and specialists who follow closely the economic development and demographic transition of China, the world's most populous country.

This book seeks to investigate gender differences in final year undergraduates' employment expectations of their starting jobs, including salary, occupational and working region expectations, and to identify factors that have contributed to gender differences in these expectations. It employs an on-site self-completion questionnaire survey and a follow-up semi-structured interview carried out in a university in Central China. The study adopts the conceptual perspective of 'choice and constraint', which means that male and female final year undergraduates are able to make their own choices towards employment expectations; however, their choices of employment expectations are limited by a number of constraints. Empirical studies find that there are gender differences in employment expectations. This study further reveals the influence of gendered economic roles, experienced or perceived sex discrimination in China's graduate labour market job preferences and parents' expectations on those gender differences in employment expectations.

This is the 20th volume in a series of research articles in social movements, conflicts and change. The papers are broad in scope and methodologically diverse.

This book presents fourteen original contributions by authors examining the importance of dwellings and local communities in people's everyday lives. Through qualitative research conducted in North America and Europe, the volume explores the ways in which home is created both ideally and practically, at levels ranging from individual housing units to neighborhoods and public spaces. Even when the circumstances of making one's home deviate from cultural ideals - for instance, in crowded, institutional, or stigmatized housing contexts, in disadvantaged or transient neighborhoods, or when one has no permanent dwelling at all - the authors illuminate how experiences and practices of home are central to what it means to be human.

Drawing on oral history interviews and archival materials, Summer of Rage examines the causes and consequences of urban unrest that occurred in Newark and Detroit during the summer of 1967. It seeks to give voice to those who experienced these events firsthand and places personal narratives in a broader theoretical framework involving issues of collective memory, trauma, race relations, and urban development. Further, the volume explores the multiple truths present in these contentious events and thereby sheds light on the past, present, and future of these cities.

Despite improvements to those affected by the digital divide, there are still many people who remain "unconnected" in today's world. This volume examines the problems of addressing the digital divide by closely examining those who remain unconnected - the untouchables or untouched within the information society. Some remain untouched because of access or ability issues that also reflect race, disability, class, geography, and socio-economic status, but others may be prevented from participation by factors of religion, language, philosophy, culture, or simply disinterest. With noted experts from communication, public policy, civic engagement, urban planning, and political science, the authors collectively examine the social, economic, and political contexts of the failure to reach the unconnected and the importance of including them in a dynamic, engaged civic democracy.

The International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994 represented a remarkable watershed. Not only did it produce an unprecedented degree of agreement among the 179 countries and thousands of non-governmental organizations taking part, it also created a wide-ranging Programme of Action which for the first time offers real chances of progress, by putting population policies at the heart of the struggle for social development. This book recounts what actually happened in Cairo and how it was achieved. The early chapters look in some detail at the preparations for Cairo, in the context of over three decades of attempts to integrate population, development and environmental issues. Focusing on the key controversial questions, including abortion, contraception and adolescent sex, it examines the ways in which attempts were made to reconcile opposing positions. Setting the discussion in a much wider context, it argues that Cairo witnessed a 'quantum leap' in the way the population issue is seen, and the need to give them control over their own lives, - central to the discussion about population, resources and development. The Programme of Action which emerged from the conference, particularly the parts dealing with gender issues (included here in appendices), is the most forward-looking ever adopted. As a whole the Programme is probably one of the most important social documents of our time. This book captures both the drama and the detail of its creation. Stanley Johnson edited The Population Problem (1974) and is the author of World Population and the United Nations (1987) and World Population Turning the Tide (1994), as well as numerous other books, including eight novels. Originally published in 1995

"Over the past decade, the impacts of demographic trends on international security and on peaceful relations between and within states have come to the fore in ways not seen since the aftermath of World War II. An evolving and more complex set of changes in the size, distribution, and composition of populations has become the basis for a new look at the security effects of changes in the size, distribution, and composition of populations. This book is an attempt to lay out the new look, to take issue with some of the prevailing views on the political consequences of population change and to suggest where the concerns are realistic and where they are not." (From the Preface) This book not only offers a magisterial analysis of the political effects of the dramatic population changes that are taking place in countries all around the world, it also represents the testimony of one of the most distinguished scholars in the field of migration and population studies.