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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies
This volume is an important contribution to the empirical research on what globalization means in different world regions. "Resistance" here has a double meaning: - Active, intentional resistance to tendencies which are rejected on political or moral grounds by presenting alternative discourses and concepts founded in specific cultural and national traditions. - Resilience with regard to globalization pressures in the sense that traditional patterns of development and politics are resistant to change and transform the impulses originating from globalization processes in a way that their results are very different when compared across regions and are not conducive to globalization. The book points out the possibility that the local, sub-national, national, and regional patterns of politics and development will coexist with globalized structures for quite a while without yielding very much ground and in ways which may turn out to be a serious barrier to further globalization. Case studies presented focus on Venezuela (A. Boeckh), Brazil (J. Faust), the Middle East (M. Beck, S. Hegasy), Iran (H. Furtig), and Russia (A. S. Makarychev, A. Shastitko, N. Zubarevich).
The book traces the genesis of Pakistan military's role in the governance of the country. With a focus on the military's political role, the book comprehensively explains the military's intrusion into politics and its implications. Governance in Pakistan is a complicated balancing act between the elected civilian leaders and the military chiefs. Primarily, it is a power-sharing arrangement in which the military has significant influence over security, defence, foreign policy and domestic issues. Delineating on how nuclear programme came under military control, the author states that the military can and will influence the nature and direction of political change even without directly assuming power. Since inception, Pakistan faced several challenges - internal security, law and order problems, financial and industrial constraints, and shortage of arms. The continued political uncertainties and domestic disturbances resulted in the expansion of functions performed by the military. The multi-dimensional role played by the military due to weak civilian institutions, factionalism and external challenges, accelerated its participation in the governance of the country. The early deaths of Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Prime Minister Liaqat Ali Khan created a leadership vacuum. The successive prime ministers' inability in providing stable governments and continued political uncertainties provided opportunities to the military directly to assume power. The military under the leadership of Gen Ayub Khan assumed power in October 1958. The successive military regimes (Gen Zia and Gen Musharraf's regime) employed the same tools in removing the elected civilian leaders. Judiciary strengthened the hands of the military rulers by legitimising their coups through their verdicts, thus playing a crucial role in strengthening and sustaining the Generals. The book delves into the internal dynamics and external factors that increased the influence of the military in Pakistan's polity, economy and society.
Novelist and nature writer Richard Horan embarked on an adventure across America to reveal that farming is still the vibrant beating heart of our nation. Horan went from coast to coast, visiting organic family farms and working the harvests of more than a dozen essential or unusual food crops--from Kansas wheat and Michigan wild rice to Maine potatoes, California walnuts, and Cape Cod cranberries--in search of connections with the farmers, the soil, the seasons, and the lifeblood of America. Sparkling with lively prose and a winning blend of profound seriousness and delightful humor, Harvest carries the reader on an eyeopening and transformational journey across the length and breadth of this remarkable land, offering a powerful national portrait of challenge and diligence, and an inspiring message of hope.
An analysis of post-communist identity reconstructions under the impact of experiences such as migration and displacement, collective memory and trauma, and cultural self-colonization. The book facilitates a mutually productive dialogue between postcolonialism and post-communism, mapping the rich terrain of contemporary East-Central European creative writing and visual art.
The phrase "free, compulsory, and secular" is central to Australia's understanding of its own education system. Yet the extent to which education in Australia, or anywhere else for that matter, can be described as "secular" is never clear or settled. This work examines the history of education in Australia, from 1910 through to the present, through an interdisciplinary survey of key scholarship and a series of six original case studies. It seeks to uncover the extent to which the education system has undergone a process of secularisation and argues that the very meaning of the term "secular" is always contingent and changeable.
Food Words is a series of provocative essays on some of the most important keywords in the emergent field of food studies, focusing on current controversies and on-going debates. Words like 'choice' and 'convenience' are often used as explanatory terms in understanding consumer behavior but are clearly ideological in the way they reflect particular positions and serve specific interests, while words like 'taste' and 'value' are no less complex and contested. Inspired by Raymond Williams, Food Words traces the multiple meanings of each of our keywords, tracking nuances in different (academic, commercial and policy) contexts. Mapping the dynamic meanings of each term, the book moves forward from critical assessment to active intervention -- an attitude that is reflected in the lively, sometimes combative, style of the essays. Each essay is research-based and fully referenced but accessible to the general reader. With a foreword by eminent food scholar Warren Belasco, Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland-Baltmore County, and written by an inter-disciplinary team associated with the CONANX research project (Consumer culture in an 'age of anxiety'), Food Words will be essential reading for food scholars across the arts, humanities and social sciences.
This in-depth exploration of the history and culture of the sometimes illegal activity of BASE jumping provides historical and current information as well as a glimpse into the incredible adrenaline rush of the sport. BASE jumping is an extreme sport that has gained significant popularity. To date, there are over 1,400 jumpers who have earned their "BASE number," which means that they have jumped from a building, an antenna, a span, and a terrestrial point. And at least one BASE jumper is planning to attempt landing from a BASE jump without a parachute. BASE Jumping: The Ultimate Guide examines the history, subculture, and technologies associated with BASE jumping. Additionally, it considers what the relatively new expansion of this activity means within the context of how our society considers danger and risk. After an introduction, its chapters cover BASE culture and ethics, the sport's origins and current developments, techniques and equipment, sites and events, pioneering jumpers and icons of the sport, and future directions. The author-a former skydiver and BASE jumper himself-draws from careful research as well as interviews with current BASE jumpers to both provide historical context and represent the voices of those participating in the activity. A history of early attempts at human flight as well as a chronology of fixed object jumping Illustrations of jumpers, BASE jumping points, and equipment A glossary of key terms such as "burnt object" and "object strike" A resource guide with additional information such as numerous films and websites for BASE organizations
This international collection brings together scientists, scholars and artist-researchers to explore the cognition of memory through the performing arts and examine artistic strategies that target cognitive processes of memory. The strongly embodied and highly trained memory systems of performing artists render artistic practice a rich context for understanding how memory is formed, utilized and adapted through interaction with others, instruments and environments. Using experimental, interpretive and Practice-as-Research methods that bridge disciplines, the authors provide overview chapters and case studies of subjects such as: * collectively and environmentally distributed memory in the performing arts; * autobiographical memory triggers in performance creation and reception; * the journey from learning to memory in performance training; * the relationship between memory, awareness and creative spontaneity, and * memorization and embodied or structural analysis of scores and scripts. This volume provides an unprecedented resource for scientists, scholars, artists, teachers and students looking for insight into the cognition of memory in the arts, strategies of learning and performance, and interdisciplinary research methodology.
How was Istanbul, once the capital of the Ottoman Empire and now the financial heart of contemporary Turkey, provisioned in the early 19th century? Tracing how the sovereign's duty to provision the city and protect his subjects from hunger was gradually transferred to the market and became a responsibility of the subjects (later, citizens) alone, Feeding Istanbul makes a compelling case for situating food politics, and politics of urban provisioning in particular, at the centre of the way we think about the relationship between the sovereign and the political community..
This book examines the discourse on 'primitive thinking' in early twentieth century Germany. It explores texts from the social sciences, writings on art and language and - most centrally - literary works by Robert Musil, Walter Benjamin, Gottfried Benn and Robert Muller, focusing on three figurations of alterity prominent in European primitivism: indigenous cultures, children, and the mentally ill.
Spaces in-between goes beyond the emphasis on externalities signalled by the term 'environment' to address the isolation of modern technological culture from nature. Solutions require more than an awareness of 'natural surroundings' and human destructiveness. We think in terms of the re-conceptualization, re-design and re-negotiation of space. The book is concerned with social practices, belief systems, urban designs, the organization and representation of landscapes and modes of living. These aspects of 'spatiality' suggest how to conceive and practice the intermingling of nature and culture and how to develop public commitment to such practices. In the process we show how concern for the environment as an aspect of space helps us to reconceive and reinterpret what it means to be human.
Since World War II, historians have analysed a phenomenon of "white flight" plaguing the urban areas of the northern United States. One of the most interesting cases of "white flight" occurred in the Chicago neighborhoods of Englewood and Roseland, where seven entire church congregations from one denomination, the Christian Reformed Church, left the city in the 1960s and 1970s and relocated their churches to nearby suburbs. In Shades of White Flight, sociologist Mark T. Mulder investigates the migration of these Chicago church members, revealing how these churches not only failed to inhibit white flight, but actually facilitated the congregations' departure. Using a wealth of both archival and interview data, Mulder sheds light on the forces that shaped these midwestern neighborhoods and shows that, surprisingly, evangelical religion fostered both segregation as well as the decline of urban stability. Indeed, the Roseland and Englewood stories show how religion - often used to foster community and social connectedness - can sometimes help to disintegrate neighborhoods. Mulder describes how the Dutch CRC formed an insular social circle that focused on the local church and Christian school - instead of the local park or square or market - as the center point of the community. Rather than embrace the larger community, the CRC subculture sheltered themselves and their families within these two places. Thus it became relatively easy - when black families moved into the neighborhood - to sell the church and school and relocate in the suburbs. This is especially true because, in these congregations, authority rested at the local church level and in fact they owned the buildings themselves. Revealing how a dominant form of evangelical church polity - congregationalism - functioned within the larger phenomenon of white flight, Shades of White Flight lends new insights into the role of religion and how it can affect social change, not always for the better.
The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction attempts to descry the historical and cultural contours of SF in the wake of technoculture studies. Rather than treating the genre as an isolated aesthetic formation, it examines SF's many lines of cross-pollination with technocultural realities since its inception in the nineteenth century, showing how SF's unique history and subcultural identity has been constructed in ongoing dialogue with popular discourses of science and technology. The volume consists of four broadly themed sections, each divided into eleven chapters. Section I, "Science Fiction as Genre," considers the internal history of SF literature, examining its characteristic aesthetic and ideological modalities, its animating social and commercial institutions, and its relationship to other fantastic genres. Section II, "Science Fiction as Medium," presents a more diverse and ramified understanding of what constitutes the field as a mode of artistic and pop-cultural expression, canvassing extra-literary manifestations of SF ranging from film and television to videogames and hypertext to music and theme parks. Section III, "Science Fiction as Culture," examines the genre in relation to cultural issues and contexts that have influenced it and been influenced by it in turn, the goal being to see how SF has helped to constitute and define important (sub)cultural groupings, social movements, and historical developments during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Finally, Section IV, "Science Fiction as Worldview," explores SF as a mode of thought and its intersection with other philosophies and large-scale perspectives on the world, from the Enlightenment to the present day.
It is easy to see that the world finds itself too often in tumultuous situations with catastrophic results. An adequate education can instill holistic knowledge, empathy, and the skills necessary for promoting an international coalition of peaceful nations. Promoting Global Peace and Civic Engagement through Education outlines the pedagogical practices necessary to inspire the next generation of peace-bringers by addressing strategies to include topics from human rights and environmental sustainability, to social justice and disarmament in a comprehensive method. Providing perspectives on how to live in a multi-cultural, multi-racial, and multi-religious society, this book is a critical reference source for educators, students of education, government officials, and administration who hope to make a positive change.
This book examines the underlying assumptions and implications of how we conceptualise and investigate poverty. The empirical entry point for such inquiry is a series of research initiatives that have used mixed method, combined qualitative and quantitative, or Q-Squared ( Q(2)) approaches, to poverty analysis. The Q(2) literature highlights the vast range of analytical tools within the social sciences that may be used to understand and explain social phenomena, along with interesting research results. This literature serves as a lens to probe issues about knowledge claims made in poverty debates concerning who are the poor (identification analysis) and why they are poor (causal analysis). Implicitly or explicitly, questions are raised about the reasons for emphasising different dimensions of poverty and favouring different units of knowledge, the basis for distinguishing valid and invalid claims, the meaning of causation, and the nature of causal inference, and so forth. Q(2) provides an entry point to address foundational issues about assumptions underlying approaches to poverty, and applied issues about the strengths and limitations of different research methods and the ways they may be fruitfully combined. Together, the strands of this inquiry make a case for methodological pluralism on the grounds that knowledge is partial, empirical adjudication imperfect, social phenomena complex, and mixed methods add value for understanding and explanation. Ultimately, the goals of understanding and explanation are best served if research questions dictate the choice of methodological approach rather than the other way around.
The Dutch-German Communist Left, represented by the German KAPD-AAUD, the Dutch KAPN and the Bulgarian Communist Workers Party, separated from the Comintern (1921) on questions like electoralism, trade-unionism, united fronts, the one-party state and anti-proletarian violence. It attracted the ire of Lenin, who wrote his Left Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder against the Linkskommunismus, while Herman Gorter wrote a famous response in his pamphlet Reply to Lenin. The present volume provides the most substantial history to date of this tendency in the twentieth-century Communist movement. It covers how the Communist left, with the KAPD-AAU, denounced 'party communism' and 'state capitalism' in Russia; how the German left survived after 1933 in the shape of the Dutch GIK and Paul Mattick's councils movement in the USA; and also how the Dutch Communistenbond Spartacus continued to fight after 1942 for the world power of the workers councils, as theorised by Pannekoek in his book Workers' Councils (1946).
Since the 1990s we witness a rise in public apologies. Are we living in the 'Age of Apology'? Interesting research questions can be raised about the opportunity, the form, the meaning, the effectiveness and the ethical implications of public apologies. Are they not merely a clever and easy device to escape real and tangible responsibility for mistakes or wrong done? Are they not at risk to become well-rehearsed rituals that claim to express regret but, in fact, avoid doing so? In a joint interdisciplinary effort, the contributors to this book, combining findings from their specific fields of research (legal, religious, political, linguistic, marketing and communication studies), attempt to articulate this tension between ritual and sincere regret, between the discourse and the content of apologies, between excuses that pretend and regret that seeks reconciliation.
Cosmopolitan Sex Workers is a groundbreaking work that examines the phenomenon of non-trafficked women who migrate from one global city to another to perform paid sexual labor in Southeast Asia. Christine Chin offers an innovative theoretical framework that she terms "3C" (city, creativity and cosmopolitanism) in order to show how factors at the local, state, transnational and individual levels work together to shape women's ability to migrate to perform sex work. Chin's book will show that as neoliberal economic restructuring processes create pathways connecting major cities throughout the world, competition and collaboration between cities creates new avenues for the movement of people, services and goods (the "city" portion of the argument). Loosely organized networks of migrant labor grow in tandem with professional-managerial classes, and sex workers migrate to different parts of cities, depending on the location of the clientele to which they cater. But while global cities create economic opportunities for migrants (and survive on the labor they provide), states also react to the presence of migrants with new forms of securitization and surveillance. Migrants therefore need to negotiate between appropriating and subverting the ideas that inform global economic restructuring to maintain agency (the "creativity"). Chin suggests that migration allows women to develop intercultural skills that help them to make these negotiations (the "cosmopolitanism"). Chin's book stands apart from other literature on migrant sex labor not only in that she focuses on non-trafficked women, but also in that she demonstrates the co-dependence between global economic processes, sex work, and women's economic agency. Through original ethnographic research with sex workers in Kuala Lumpur, she shows that migrant sex work can provide women with the means of earning income for families, for education, and even for their own businesses. It also allows women the means to travel the world - a form of cosmopolitanism "from below."
This study of clothing during British colonial America examines items worn by the well-to-do as well as the working poor, the enslaved, and Native Americans, reconstructing their wardrobes across social, economic, racial, and geographic boundaries. Clothing through American History: The British Colonial Era presents, in six chapters, a description of all aspects of dress in British colonial America, including the social and historical background of British America, and covering men's, women's, and children's garments. The book shows how dress reflected and evolved with life in British colonial America as primitive settlements gave way to the growth of towns, cities, and manufacturing of the pre-Industrial Revolution. Readers will discover that just as in the present day, what people wore in colonial times represented an immediate, visual form of communication that often conveyed information about the real or intended social, economic, legal, ethnic, and religious status of the wearer. The authors have gleaned invaluable information from a wide breadth of primary source materials for all of the colonies: court documents and colonial legislation; diaries, personal journals, and business ledgers; wills and probate inventories; newspaper advertisements; paintings, prints, and drawings; and surviving authentic clothing worn in the colonies.
Global Modernity from Coloniality to Pandemic explores issues related to the global crises of our time: reason, science, and the environment by revisiting the notions of modernity, modernism, and modernization, which can no longer be considered purely Western or strictly secular. The book poses questions about viewing modernity today from the vantage point of traditionally disparate disciplines - engaging scholars from sociology to science, philosophy to robotics, medicine to visual culture, mathematics to cultural theory, biology to environmental studies. Leading sociologist Alain Touraine contributes a new text in which he reflects on the role of women, refugees and migrants, and the future of democracy. In their conclusion, the editors posit a fundamental ethical distinction between modernization and modernity and call for a new understanding of modernity that is globally distributed, informed by the voices of many, and concerned with crises that threaten all of us at the level of the species - a modernity-to-come.
Sapiens showed us where we came from. In uncertain times, Homo Deus shows us where we’re going. Yuval Noah Harari envisions a near future in which we face a new set of challenges. Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century and beyond – from overcoming death to creating artificial life. It asks the fundamental questions: how can we protect this fragile world from our own destructive power? And what does our future hold? 'Homo Deus will shock you. It will entertain you. It will make you think in ways you had not thought before’ Daniel Kahneman, bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow |
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