In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the People's Republic of China experienced dramatic growth and expansion that altered the educational environment of children. Rapid economic development increased prosperity and educational opportunities for children expanded in a wealthier society. Yet, a by-product of rising wealth was rising inequality. While the children of the emerging urban middle and elite classes enjoyed new prosperity, the children of hte persistently poor in rural communities continued to experience challenges such as food insecurity, illness, hardships of family separation, and migrant life on the margins of the cities. This time period saw a large resource gap emerge between the home conditions of poor rural children compared with those of their wealthier urban counterparts. This book highlights the complexities China has experienced in seeking to extend full educational access to rural children- including rural- to- urban migrant and ethnic minority children-during a momentous period in China. Chapters delve into the experiences, perceptions, strategies, and diffi culties of rural- origin children and their families in the school system, and lay bare the challenges of policy initiatives designed to support rural education. We hope the experiences detailed here will be of interest to students and scholars of rural educational policy and practice in China and worldwide.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351017558, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Few institutions in modern society are as significant as universities, yet our historical and sociological understanding of the role of higher education has not been substantially updated for decades. By revisiting the emergence and transformation of higher education since 1800 using a novel processual approach, this book recognizes these developments as having been as central to constituting the modern world as the industrial and democratic revolutions. This new interpretation of the role of universities in contemporary society promises to re-orient our understanding of the importance of higher education in the past and future development of modern societies. It will therefore appeal to scholars of social science and history with interests in social history and social change, education, the professions and inequalities.

In 1963, President Kennedy proposed making permanent a small pilot project called the Food Stamp Program (FSP). By 2013, the program's fiftieth year, more than one in seven Americans received benefits at a cost of nearly $80 billion. Renamed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in 2008, it currently faces sharp political pressure, but the social science research necessary to guide policy is still nascent. In SNAP Matters, Judith Bartfeld, Craig Gundersen, Timothy M. Smeeding, and James P. Ziliak bring together top scholars to begin asking and answering the questions that matter. For example, what are the antipoverty effects of SNAP? Does SNAP cause obesity? Or does it improve nutrition and health more broadly? To what extent does SNAP work in tandem with other programs, such as school breakfast and lunch? Overall, the volume concludes that SNAP is highly responsive to macroeconomic pressures and is one of the most effective antipoverty programs in the safety net, but the volume also encourages policymakers, students, and researchers to continue examining this major pillar of social assistance in America.

In 1963, President Kennedy proposed making permanent a small pilot project called the Food Stamp Program (FSP). By 2013, the program's fiftieth year, more than one in seven Americans received benefits at a cost of nearly $80 billion. Renamed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in 2008, it currently faces sharp political pressure, but the social science research necessary to guide policy is still nascent. In SNAP Matters, Judith Bartfeld, Craig Gundersen, Timothy M. Smeeding, and James P. Ziliak bring together top scholars to begin asking and answering the questions that matter. For example, what are the antipoverty effects of SNAP? Does SNAP cause obesity? Or does it improve nutrition and health more broadly? To what extent does SNAP work in tandem with other programs, such as school breakfast and lunch? Overall, the volume concludes that SNAP is highly responsive to macroeconomic pressures and is one of the most effective antipoverty programs in the safety net, but the volume also encourages policymakers, students, and researchers to continue examining this major pillar of social assistance in America.

Originally published 1987 Schooling Ordinary Kids looks at the 'invisible majority' of ordinary working-class pupils. The book explains why these pupils are now at the centre of a major educational crisis surrounding the soaring rates of youth unemployment. The book is a timely examination of educational inequalities, unemployment, and the new vocationalism. Drawing extensively the study of schools in the urban centre of South Wales the book highlights the need for an alternative politics of education, if we were to meet the educational challenge of the late-twentieth century. The new vocationalism is revealed here as a policy for inequality both politically and in the classroom.

This volume develops a historically informed phenomenology of caste and untouchability. It explores the idea of 'Brahmin' and the practice of untouchability by offering a scholarly reading of ancient and medieval texts. By going beyond the notions of purity and pollution, it presents a new framework of understanding relationships between social groups and social categories. An important intervention in the study of caste and untouchability, this book will be an essential read for the scholars and researchers of political studies, political philosophy, cultural studies, Dalit studies, Indology, sociology, social anthropology and Ambedkar studies.

Initially published in 1966. A study of the social and economic conditions of a small fishing village in Kelantan, on the north-east coast of Malay. The study, from August 1939 to July 1940 is based on collaborations with the author's husband's investigations explores how the Kelantan people use their money, manage resources, their behaviour, how religion affects theie day to day lives, and their standard of living.

Revealing Britain's Systemic Racism applies an existing scholarly paradigm (systemic racism and the white racial frame) to assess the implications of Markle's entry and place in the British royal family, including an analysis that bears on visual and material culture. The white racial frame, as it manifests in the UK, represents an important lens through which to map and examine contemporary racism and related inequities. By questioning the long-held, but largely anecdotal, beliefs about racial progressiveness in the UK, the authors provide an original counter-narrative about how Markle's experiences as a biracial member of the royal family can help illumine contemporary forms of racism in Britain. Revealing Britain's Systemic Racism identifies and documents the plethora of ways systemic racism continues to shape ecological spaces in the UK. Kimberley Ducey and Joe R. Feagin challenge romanticized notions of racial inclusivity by applying Feagin's long-established work, aiming to make a unique and significant contribution to literature in sociology and in various other disciplines.

Based on qualitative research among industrial workers in a region that has undergone deindustrialisation and transformation to a service-based economy, this book examines the loss of status among former manual labourers. Focus lies on their emotional experiences, nostalgic memories, hauntings from the past and attachments to their former places of work, to transformed neighbourhoods, as well as to public space. Against this background the book explores the continued importance of class as workers attempt to manage the declining recognition of their skills and a loss of power in an "established-outsider figuration". A study of the transformation of everyday life and social positions wrought by changes in the social structure, in urban landscapes and in the "structures of feeling", this examination of the dynamic of social identity will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology and geography with interests in post-industrial societies, social inequality, class and social identity.

The contemporary has marked itself off from modernity by questioning its humanism that centers the world around the human as the moral subject of free will and self-determination, the bearer of universal essence that is the basis of human rights. Modernism normalizes humanism through language as referential, a set of interrelated signs that correspond to the empirical reality outside it. Humanist modernity, in other words, is seen in the contemporary as a regime that, by separating the human from the non-human and insisting on language as correspondence, not only fails to engage the emerging forms of social relations in which the boundaries of human and machine are fading but is also indifferent to the difference between the "other"'s life and other lives. Human, All Too (Post)Human: The Humanities after Humanism argues that the Nietzschean tendencies that provide the philosophical boundaries of post-humanism do not undo humanism but reform it, constructing a parallel discourse that saves humanism from itself. Grounded in materialist analysis of social life, Human, All Too (Post)Human argues that humanism and post-humanism are cultural discourses that normalize different stages of capitalism-analog and digital capitalism. They are different orders of property relations. The question, the writers argue, is not humanism or post-humanism, namely cultural representations, but the material relations of production that are centered on wage labor. Language, free will, or human rights are not the issues since "Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby." The question that shapes all questions, in Human, All Too (Post)Human is freedom from (wage) labor.

Lost Childhood explores the everyday lives of street children in India. It presents insights on their life on the streets to provide a comprehensive understanding of why they are driven to extreme means of livelihoods. This volume, * Inquiries into the histories of street children, and discusses their socio-economic and socio-demographic characteristics to provide a sense of their living conditions; * Sheds light on the social injustice experienced by these children, their health and hygiene, and also looks at the insecurities faced by the children in their interactions with the society; * Uses detailed field research data to highlight issues that affect the lives of street children such as education, gender discrimination, and their social networks; * Suggests a way forward that would not only benefit street children but will also be of use to the community in understanding their lives, problems, and help explore this issue in further detail. The book will be useful to scholars and researchers of human geography, development studies, child development, urban poverty, and social justice. It will also be of interest to policymakers, social workers, and field workers who work with street children.

Do writings about ethnicity, class and gender form a 'holy trinity' or challenge previous unidimensional analyses? Intersexions accepts the triple perspective but goes further. One aim is to understand the processes by which relations of power are maintained, reproduced and resisted. Intersexions also examines modes of representation: within social theory, feminism, development theory and discussions of capitalism and postcolonialism, as well as dominant ideological notions of caste, domesticity and 'success'. The writers' approaches are all critical but concerned also with providing alternatives. Comparative and specific analyses are combined, attention is paid to the written and spoken material of the people 'represented' and their own positions as commentators examined. Topics range from discussions of family ideology and paid and domestic work, to analyses of writings by Aboriginals, Vanuatuans and second generation Greek Australians and critiques of the cultural construction of gender and ethnicity in Bangladesh, India and Indonesia. Themes recur and overlap. Unitary categories are questioned and the processes by which relations described as 'class', 'ethnic', 'cultural' and 'gender' intersect and interact are demonstrated.

The concept of agency has long been drawn upon - overtly or implicitly - in contemporary social theory. However, theory shapes how human agency and its determinants are understood and can be built upon. The last few years have seen growing interest in notions of privilege and affect. How might these newer concepts affect our understanding of agency? Does human agency need to make new modes of sociability possible, and how does privilege constrain or facilitate possibilities for social change? Privilege, Agency and Affect seeks to answer some of these questions, showcasing recent work by UK, North American, Australasian and Scandinavian writers at the cutting edge of sociology, social theory and education. Strongly empirical as well as theoretical in the approach taken, it offers a timely extension of foundations laid in early 21st century social theory and debate.

Based on extensive survey data, this book examines how the population of Japan has experienced and processed three decades of rapid social change from the highly egalitarian high growth economy of the 1980s to the economically stagnating and demographically shrinking gap society of the 2010s. It discusses social attitudes and values towards, for example, work, gender roles, family, welfare and politics, highlighting certain subgroups which have been particularly affected by societal changes. It explores social consciousness and concludes that although many Japanese people identify as middle class, their reasons for doing so have changed over time, with the result that the optimistic view prevailing in the 1980s, confident of upward mobility, has been replaced by people having a much more realistic view of their social status.

The first of the UN Millennium Goals was to reduce extreme poverty and in 2014 it was halved compared to 1990, and now the goal is to eradicate poverty and hunger by 2030. The reduction in poverty is, to a high degree, the consequence of the rapid economic development in a few countries, especially China, but in many countries around the globe poverty is still at a high level and is influencing societies' overall development. It is against this background that this Handbook provides an up-to-date analysis and overview of the topic from a large variety of theoretical and methodological angles. Organised into four parts, the Handbook provides knowledge on what poverty is, how it has developed, and what type of policies might be able to succeed in reducing poverty. Part I investigates conceptual issues and relates concepts to people's relative position in society and the understanding of justice. Part II shows how poverty has developed. It combines existing empirical knowledge with regional/national understandings of the issue of poverty. Part III analyses policies and interventions with the aim of reducing or alleviating poverty within a national as well as global context. It includes a variety of countries and examples. Finally, Part IV tells us what can be done about poverty; what instruments are available to end poverty as we know it today. This volume will be an invaluable reference book for students and scholars throughout the social sciences, particularly in sociology, social policy, public policy, development studies, international relations and politics.

This book investigates the life, working conditions, and urban experiences of support service workers, such as janitors, security guards, culinary workers and carpool drivers, in the information technology (IT) sector of India. Largely omitted from academic discourse, support service workers are crucial to the Indian IT industry. Drawing on interviews with such workers in seven Indian cities with a large concentration of software service companies, this volume: Uses quantitative and qualitative analyses to map and assess workers' responses to migration from rural occupations to a modern urban employment setting; Explores the everyday grind of migrant workers in the context of the homogenizing effects of globalization in an alienating urban environment and discusses how their dislodgment from the structures of rural life - gender and caste roles - has placed them in a space of contestation between traditions and the opportunities and challenges offered by digital society in the form of freedom, individualism, flexibility and innovation; Traces the evolution of new areas of class, and identity formations, as well as the hegemonic relations within that ethos imposed by contractors and corporations. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of sociology and social anthropology, urban studies, development studies, labour studies, social exclusion and South Asian studies.

Economic Cycles and Social Movements: Past, Present and Future offers diverse perspectives on the complex interrelationship between social challenges and economic crises in the Modern World System. Written with a balance of quantitative, qualitative and theoretical contributions and insights, this volume provides a great opportunity to reflect upon the ongoing conceptual and empirical challenges when confronting the complex interrelations of various economic cycles and social movements. By engaging wide-ranging ideas and theoretical points of view from different disciplines, different countries and different perspectives, this study breaks new ground and offers novel insights into the way the capitalist world economy functions as well as the way social and political movements react to these constraints. Different chapters in this volume bring about novel interdisciplinary approaches to study business cycles, economic changes and social as well as political movements, offer new interpretations and, while examining the complexity of socioeconomic cycles in the long run, present epistemological challenges and a wide variety of empirical data that will increase our understanding of these complex interactions.

The eminent scholar Lewis R. Gordon offers a probing meditation on freedom, justice, and decolonization. What is there to be understood and done when it is evident that the search for justice, which dominates social and political philosophy of the North, is an insufficient approach for the achievements of dignity, freedom, liberation, and revolution? Gordon takes the reader on a journey as he interrogates a trail from colonized philosophy to re-imagining liberation and revolution to critical challenges raised by Afropessimism, theodicy, and looming catastrophe. He offers not forecast and foreclosure but instead an urgent call for dignifying and urgent acts of political commitment. Such movements take the form of examining what philosophy means in Africana philosophy, liberation in decolonial thought, and the decolonization of justice and normative life. Gordon issues a critique of the obstacles to cultivating emancipatory politics, challenging reductionist forms of thought that proffer harm and suffering as conditions of political appearance and the valorization of nonhuman being. He asserts instead emancipatory considerations for occluded forms of life and the irreplaceability of existence in the face of catastrophe and ruin, and he concludes, through a discussion with the Circassian philosopher and decolonial theorist, Madina Tlostanova, with the project of shifting the geography of reason.

Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood offers a comparative sociocultural and spatial history of white supremacist women who were active in segregationist grassroots activism in Little Rock, New Orleans, and Charleston from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. Through her examination, Rebecca Bruckmann uncovers and evaluates the roles, actions, self-understandings, and media representations of segregationist women in massive resistance in urban and metropolitan settings. Bruckmann argues that white women were motivated by an everyday culture of white supremacy, and they created performative spaces for their segregationist agitation in the public sphere to legitimize their actions. While other studies of mass resistance have focused on maternalism, Bruckmann shows that women's invocation of motherhood was varied and primarily served as a tactical tool to continuously expand these women's spaces. Through this examination she differentiates the circumstances, tactics, and representations used in the creation of performative spaces by working-class, middle-class, and elite women engaged in massive resistance. Bruckmann focuses on the transgressive "street politics" of working-class female activists in Little Rock and New Orleans that contrasted with the more traditional political actions of segregationist, middle-class, and elite women in Charleston, who aligned white supremacist agitation with long-standing experience in conservative women's clubs, including the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Daughters of the American Revolution. Working-class women's groups chose consciously transgressive strategies, including violence, to elicit shock value and create states of emergency to further legitimize their actions and push for white supremacy.

Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood offers a comparative sociocultural and spatial history of white supremacist women who were active in segregationist grassroots activism in Little Rock, New Orleans, and Charleston from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. Through her examination, Rebecca Bruckmann uncovers and evaluates the roles, actions, self-understandings, and media representations of segregationist women in massive resistance in urban and metropolitan settings. Bruckmann argues that white women were motivated by an everyday culture of white supremacy, and they created performative spaces for their segregationist agitation in the public sphere to legitimize their actions. While other studies of mass resistance have focused on maternalism, Bruckmann shows that women's invocation of motherhood was varied and primarily served as a tactical tool to continuously expand these women's spaces. Through this examination she differentiates the circumstances, tactics, and representations used in the creation of performative spaces by working-class, middle-class, and elite women engaged in massive resistance. Bruckmann focuses on the transgressive "street politics" of working-class female activists in Little Rock and New Orleans that contrasted with the more traditional political actions of segregationist, middle-class, and elite women in Charleston, who aligned white supremacist agitation with long-standing experience in conservative women's clubs, including the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Daughters of the American Revolution. Working-class women's groups chose consciously transgressive strategies, including violence, to elicit shock value and create states of emergency to further legitimize their actions and push for white supremacy.

In the three decades before the First World War, the relationship between socialism and feminism was both curious and convoluted. Despite strong theoretical links between these ideologies, class and sex seem to have inspired conflicting loyalties and opposing demands. In Britain, the uniquely middle-class, reform-minded Fabian Society might have been expected to bridge the gap between these movements. Yet, between 1884 and 1914, the Fabian Society's record on the "woman question" was highly inconsistent and, at times, overtly regressive. Originally published in 1987, this title looks at three of the most influential members, Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw and Hubert Bland and the women they were married to, who were also active in the Society.

Under contemporary capitalism the extraction of value from the built environment has escalated, working in tandem with other urban processes to lay the foundations for the exploitative processes of gentrification world-wide. Global gentrifications: Uneven development and displacement critically assesses and tests the meaning and significance of gentrification in places outside the `usual suspects' of the Global North. Informed by a rich array of case studies from cities in Asia, Latin America, Africa, Southern Europe, and beyond, the book (re)discovers the important generalities and geographical specificities associated with the uneven process of gentrification globally. It highlights intensifying global struggles over urban space and underlines gentrification as a growing and important battleground in the contemporary world. The book will be of value to students and academics, policy makers, planners and community organisations.

This edited collection explores issues that arise when researching "hard-to-reach" groups and those who remain socially excluded and marginalized in society, such as access, the use of gatekeepers, ethical dilemmas, "voice," and how such research contributes to issues of inclusion and social justice. The book uses a wide range of empirical and theoretical approaches to examine the difficulties, dilemmas and complexities surrounding research methodologies with particular groups. It emphasizes the importance of national and international perspectives in such discussions, and suggests innovative methodological procedures.

British labour history has been one of the dominating areas of historical research in the last sixty years and this book, written in honour of Professor Chris Wrigley, offers a collection of essays written by leading British labour historians of that subject including Ken Brown, Malcolm Chase and Matthew Worley. It focuses upon trade unionism, the co-operative movement, the rise and fall of the Labour Party, and working-class lives, comparing British labour movements with those in Germany and examining the social and political labour activities of the Lansburys. There is, indeed, some important work connected with the cultural developments of the British labour movement, most obviously in the essay written by Matthew Worley on communism and Punk Rock. -- .

Positioned within the discourse of neoliberalism and precarious work, this book draws on Guy Standing's notion of "the precariat" in an examination of the role of recruiting individuals as the key actors in labour recruitment and management practices that produce precarious work conditions. Based on extensive empirical work on migrant construction workers and their recruiters in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh and one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, it explores the ways in which exploitative employment relationships contribute to various pressures and insecurities amongst migrant workers and limit the scope for labour protection. Offering new insights into the field of labour migration by unpacking the interconnections between rural-urban labour migration, recruitment and precarious employment, The Construction Precariat conceptualises the domination of recruiters as producing "hyper-individualised employment", and sheds light on the manner in which this relationship of domination and dependence contributes heavily both to the conditions of precariousness and to the control and exploitation of migrant workers.