At a time when politicians place increasing importance on the role of 'community' in overcoming social problems, "Searching for Community" asks the vital question 'what is community, anyway?'. Is it an answer to social problems or an illusion to be dismissed? This insightful book is written from the perspective of the late Jeremy Brent's thirty year involvement as a youth worker in Southmead, a housing estate in Bristol and a place where discourses of community run strong. "Searching for Community" presents a variety of perspectives to challenge the ways in which areas of poverty and disrepute are represented. It examines ways to understand and engage with the troublesome concept of 'community', vividly describing the collective actions of young people and adults to show the way community is enacted as a combination of dreams, actions and materiality.Providing a unique mix of practical knowledge and a sophisticated analysis of popular, professional, and theoretical ideas of community, "Searching for Community" makes uneasy reading for those looking for simplistic solutions to issues including youth crime, social marginalisation and community empowerment. This accessible book is a must-read for students and practitioners in the fields of community development, sociology and youth work who wish to get beyond the rhetoric and engage with the complexities of discourses of community.

Peculiar Whiteness: Racial Anxiety and Poor Whites in Southern Literature, 1900-1965 argues for deeper consideration of the complexities surrounding the disparate treatment of poor whites throughout southern literature and attests to how broad such experiences have been. While the history of prejudice against this group is not the same as the legacy of violence perpetrated against people of color in America, individuals regarded as ""white trash"" have suffered a dehumanizing process in the writings of various white authors. Poor white characters are frequently maligned as grotesque and anxiety inducing, especially when they are aligned in close proximity to blacks or to people with disabilities. Thus, as a symbol, much has been asked of poor whites, and various iterations of the label (e.g., ""white trash,"" tenant farmers, or even people with a little less money than average) have been subject to a broad spectrum of judgment, pity, compassion, fear, and anxiety. Peculiar Whiteness engages key issues in contemporary critical race studies, whiteness studies, and southern studies, both literary and historical. Through discussions of authors including Charles Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, Sutton Griggs, Erskine Caldwell, Lillian Smith, William Faulkner, and Flannery O'Connor, we see how whites in a position of power work to maintain their status, often by finding ways to recategorize and marginalize people who might not otherwise have seemed to fall under the auspices or boundaries of ""white trash.

The common wisdom that business contributions to the common good are counterproductive in the new competitive global marketplace does not hold up to empirical research. In fact, doing good is good for business, and a majority of businesses do provide some form of community support, which Besser discovered in her exhaustive survey of the Iowa business community. Business owners and managers often act out of a sense of community spirit and a certain obligation to better the common good. While the increasingly globalized economy has encouraged a number of large corporations to become freewheelers, the vast majority of companies are firmly rooted in place and look at their locales with more than just a utilitarian eye.

Extensive interviews with Iowa business owners, managers, and business and community leaders are combined with findings from prior studies of corporate citizenship, and the evidence clearly indicates that the majority of businesses provide some form of community support. Most owners feel they should do more than just make a profit, so they often seek ways to give back to their communities, a move that is usually nurtured within the business community itself. However, corporate altruism carries risks. Many business owners have unwittingly offended customers and clients by their acts of civic spirit. Besser concludes her book by addressing the potential threats to business social responsibility posed by globalization and recommends steps to enhance socially responsible capitalism. Anybody interested in the complex interaction of businesses and the communities they reside in will enjoy reading this positive revisitation of the mutually supportive relationship between trade and polity.

Within Western Buddhism, practitioners are often assumed to be white and middle-class. Based in ground-breaking empirical research, Cosmopolitan Dharma: Race, Sexuality, and Gender in British Buddhism explores the stories of Buddhists from minority communities, through a rich analysis of their lived experiences. Smith, Munt and Yip explore their various contestations of dominant white and heteronormative cultures in Western Buddhism. Using cosmopolitanism as the theoretical lens, Cosmopolitan Dharma argues convincingly that the Buddhist ethos of human interconnectivity needs to be further developed to truly embrace the 'Other' of different kinds (not least Western Buddhism's own internal 'Others'). Cosmopolitan Dharma, through Buddhists' own narratives, explores how cultural politics from the ground up can offer a more inclusive philosophy and lived experience of spirituality.

Communes and utopian communities are groups of men and women who share a central or common belief and choose to live together away from mainstream society. Many of the individuals in these communes are characterized by or aspire to perfection. This reference source contains biographies and historical overviews of 20th-century communes and utopias in the United States and those individuals involved with them. Sutton provides a comprehensive history of both religious and secular utopian communities. Entries include Amity Colony, Farm Eco-Village, Holy City, David Koresh, Shaker Communities, The Farm, and Donald Walters, among many others.

Each entry includes a list of print and electronic sources for further reading. An appendix listing 20th-century American communal and utopian societies is also provided. Ideal for students and researchers interested in anthropology, labor history, politics, cults, sects, workers movements and welfare communities.

examines Thai-Chinese relations, dating back to the first Thai dynasty (Sukhothai) to the present (Ratanakosin). The study explores the Thai domestic policies that have affected the Chinese population since World War II and assimilation policies of the Thai government towards the Chinese. This book also analyzes both Skinner's and Chan and Tong's arguments, and their main idea in the context of the present day environment and situation for the ethnic Chinese. This research supports the Skinnerian paradigm, which asserts that "a majority of the descendants of Chinese immigrants in each generation merge with Thai society and become indistinguishable from the indigenous population to the extent that fourth-generation Chinese are practically non-existent." The validation of the Skinnerian paradigm rejects Chan and Tong's hypothesis, which claims that Skinner has "overemphasized the forces of assimilation" and that the Chinese in Thailand have not assimilated but retained their Chinese identity. To support Skinner's assertion and reject Chan and Tong's argument, this book presents rich empirical data collected via surveys conducted with the ethnic Chinese in Thailand from 2003-2004. This study uncovers that the forces of assimilation occur at two levels. On the first level, the Chinese in Thailand possess natural attributes which facilitate social and cultural integration and assimilation into Thai society. On the second level, government pro-assimilation policies, driven by the bilateral relations between Thailand and China and the political situation in both countries, are also responsible for the assimilation of the Chinese in Thailand. As the most current in-depth study on the Chinese in Thailand, The Chinese Emigres of Thailand in the Twentieth Century is a critical addition for all collections in Asian Studies as well as Ethnic and Immigrant Studies.

Victory at Home is at once an institutional history of the federal War Manpower Commission and a social history of the southern labor force within the commission's province. Charles D. Chamberlain explores how southern working families used America's rapid wartime industrialization and an expanded federal presence to gain unprecedented economic, social, and geographic mobility in the chronically poor region. Chamberlain looks at how war workers, black leaders, white southern elites, liberal New Dealers, nonsouthern industrialists, and others used and shaped the federal war mobilization effort to fill their own needs. He shows, for instance, how African American, Latino, and white laborers worked variously through churches, labor unions, federal agencies, the NAACP, and the Urban League, using a wide variety of strategies from union organizing and direct action protest to job shopping and migration. Throughout, Chamberlain is careful not to portray the southern wartime labor scene in monolithic terms. He discusses, for instance, conflicts between racial groups within labor unions and shortfalls between the War Manpower Commission's national directives and their local implementation. An important new work in southern economic and industrial history, Victory at Home also has implications for the prehistory of both the civil rights revolution and the massive resistance movement of the 1960s. As Chamberlain makes clear, African American workers used the coalition of unions, churches, and civil rights organizations built up during the war to challenge segregation and disenfranchisement in the postwar South.

This book is a study of the power to monitor what is said, authorize who may speak, and even to determine what is and is not knowable within the context of electronic discourse communities. It tests the claim that the Internet and other wide-area networking systems promote participatory democracies and may serve as agencies for communal change by enabling the formation of resisting subjectivities.

Renee Moreau Cunningham's unique study utilizes the psychology of C. G. Jung and the spiritual teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. to explore how nonviolence works psychologically as a form of spiritual warfare, confronting and transmuting aggression. Archetypal Nonviolence uses King's iconic march from Selma to Montgomery, a demonstration which helped introduce America to nonviolent philosophy on a mass scale, as a metaphor for psychological and spiritual activism on an individual and collective level. Cunningham's work explores the core wound of racism in America on both a collective and a personal level, investigating how we hide from our own potential for evil and how the divide within ourselves can be bridged. The book demonstrates that the alchemical transmutation of aggression through a nonviolent ethos, as shown in the Selma marches, is important to understand as a beginning to something greater within the paradox of human violence and its bedfellow, nonviolence. Archetypal Nonviolence explores how we can truly transform hatred by understanding how it operates within. It will be of great interest to Jungian analysts and analytical psychologists in practice and in training, and to academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, American history, race and racism, and nonviolent movements.

Irish migrants in new communities: Seeking the Fair Land? comprises the second collection of essays by these editors exploring fresh aspects and perspectives on the subject of the Irish diaspora. This volume, edited by Mairtin O Cathain and Micheal O hAodha, develops many of the oral history themes of the first book and concentrates more on issues surrounding the adaptation of migrants to new or host environments and cultures. These new places often have a jarring effect, as well as a welcoming air, and the Irish bring their own interpretations, hostilities, and suspicions, all of which are explored in a fascinating and original number of new perspectives.

Across Rampart Street from the French Quarter, the Faubourg Treme neighborhood is arguably the most important location for African American culture in New Orleans. Closely associated with traditional jazz and "second line" parading, Treme is now the setting for an eponymous television series created by David Simon (best known for his work on The Wire). Michael Crutcher argues that Treme's story is essentially spatial-a story of how neighborhood boundaries are drawn and take on meaning and of how places within neighborhoods are made and unmade by people and politics. Treme has long been sealed off from more prominent parts of the city, originally by the fortified walls that gave Rampart Street its name, and so has become a refuge for less powerful New Orleanians. This notion of Treme as a safe haven-the flipside of its reputation as a "neglected" place-has been essential to its role as a cultural incubator, Crutcher argues, from the antebellum slave dances in Congo Square to jazz pickup sessions at Joe's Cozy Corner. Treme takes up a wide range of issues in urban life, including highway construction, gentrification, and the role of public architecture in sustaining collective memory. Equally sensitive both to black-white relations and to differences within the African American community, it is a vivid evocation of one of America's most distinctive places.

This expanded collection of new and fully revised explorations of media content identifies the ways we all have been negatively stereotyped and demonstrates how careful analysis of media portrayals can create more beneficial alternatives. Not all damaging stereotypes are obvious. In fact, the pictorial stereotypes in the media that we don't notice could be the most harmful because we aren't even aware of the negative, false ideas they perpetrate. This book presents a series of original research essays on media images of groups including African Americans, Latinos, women, the elderly, the physically disabled, gays and lesbians, and Jewish Americans, just to mention a few. Specific examples of these images are derived from a variety of sources, such as advertising, fine art, film, television shows, cartoons, the Internet, and other media, providing a wealth of material for students and professionals in almost any field. Images That Injure: Pictorial Stereotypes in the Media, Third Edition not only accurately describes and analyzes the media's harmful depictions of cultural groups, but also offers creative ideas on alternative representations of these individuals. These discussions illuminate how each of us is responsible for contributing to a sea of meaning within our mass culture. 33 distinguished authors as well as new voices in the field combine their extensive and varied expertise to explain the social effects of media stereotyping. Includes historical and contemporary illustrations that range from editorial cartoons to the sinking of the Titanic Richly illustrated with historical and up-to-date photographic illustrations Every chapter's content is meticulously supported with numerous sources cited A glossary defines key words mentioned in the chapters

The challenge of life and literary narrative is the central and perennial mystery of how people encounter, manage, and inhabit a self and a world of their own - and others' - creations. With a nod to the eminent scholar and psychologist Jerome Bruner, Life and Narrative: The Risks and Responsibilities of Storying Experience explores the circulation of meaning between experience and the recounting of that experience to others. A variety of arguments center around the kind of relationship life and narrative share with one another. In this volume, rather than choosing to argue that this relationship is either continuous or discontinuous, editors Brian Schiff, A. Elizabeth McKim, and Sylvie Patron and their contributing authors reject the simple binary and masterfully incorporate a more nuanced approach that has more descriptive appeal and theoretical traction for readers. Exploring such diverse and fascinating topics as 'Narrative and the Law,' 'Narrative Fiction, the Short Story, and Life,' 'The Body as Biography,' and 'The Politics of Memory,' Life and Narrative features important research and perspectives from both up-and-coming researchers and prominent scholars in the field - many of which who are widely acknowledged for moving the needle forward on the study of narrative in their respective disciplines and beyond.

The Canyon de Chelly is one of the best Cliff Ruins regions in the United States. This book details the pueblo dwellings in the region, with over a hundred black and white diagrams and photographs. The original index and footnotes have been preserved.

Many of the available resources for teaching courses on feminist spirituality either come from the 1980s to 1990s or are written by the same authors as those earlier texts, thus showing us a progression of spiritual beliefs and practices of 'second-wave' feminists. This is useful, but when addressing this topic with university students it is also important to show the ways in which spirituality has been rethought by 'third-wave' feminists. This rethinking can be found in various small circulation 'zines, but these are not always accessible to a wide audience. This anthology addresses the experiences of third-wave feminists in the construction and reformulation of spirituality. It examines the experiences of young feminists and others who have been influenced by second-wave feminist spirituality and engaged in developing and critiquing themes of Goddess religion, queer theory, protest movements, and popular culture.