Featuring a foreword penned by Ambassador (Ret) and Professor Emeritus Horace G. Dawson, this volume articulates the significance of comparative and international education and affairs as experienced by elected Fellows of the Comparative and International Education Society-including some as Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the International Academy of Education. Based upon their decades of multiple research modalities and senior administrative engagements with universities, USAID, National Science Foundation, World Bank, Fulbright, and other agencies, the Fellows explicate critical historical phenomena and postulate how future directions of the field may evolve. The volume expounds the salience of cross cutting and interdisciplinary themes by analyzing how the social sciences, humanities, and international affairs have affected the evolving nature of the field. Pedagogical epistemologies, public and educational policies, and paradigms emerge from applied research as new motifs are presented in view of geopolitical and global affairs that will affect education in coming decades.

This book explores the influence of geographical isolation and peripherality on the functioning of music industries and scenes which operate within and from such locales. As is explored, these sites engage dynamic practices to offset challenges resulting from geographical isolation and peripherality.

This book weaves together research on cultural change in Central Europe and Eurasia: notably, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. Examining massive cultural shifts in erstwhile state-communist nations since 1989, the authors analyze how the region is moving in both freeing and restrictive directions. They map out these directions in such arenas as LGBTQ protest cultures, new Russian fiction, Polish memory of Jewish heritage, ethnic nationalisms, revival of minority cultures, and loss of state support for museums. From a comparison of gender constructions in 30 national constitutions to an exploration of a cross-national artistic collaborative, this insightful book illuminates how the region's denizens are swimming in changing tides of transnational cultures, resulting in new hybridities and innovations. Arguing for a decolonization of the region and for the significance of culture, the book appeals to a wide, interdisciplinary readership interested in cultural change, post-communist societies, and globalization.

As a way to comment on a person's style or taste, the word "tacky" has distinctly southern origins, with its roots tracing back to the so-called "tackies" who tacked horses on South Carolina farms prior to the Civil War. The Tacky South presents eighteen fun, insightful essays that examine connections between tackiness and the American South, ranging from nineteenth-century local color fiction and the television series Murder, She Wrote to red velvet cake and the ubiquitous influence of Dolly Parton. Charting the gender, race, and class constructions at work in regional aesthetics, The Tacky South explores what shifting notions of tackiness reveal about US culture as a whole and the role that region plays in addressing national and global issues of culture and identity.

For the inaugural book in our Critical Adventures in New Media series, Douglas Kellner elaborates upon his well known theory which explores how media spectacle can be used as a key to interpreting contemporary culture and politics. Grounded in both cultural and communication theory, Kellner argues that politics, war, news and information, media events (like terrorist attacks or royal weddings), and now democratic uprisings, are currently organized around media spectacles, and demonstrates how and why this has occurred. Rooting the discussions within key events of 2011 - including the war in Libya, the Arab Uprisings, the wedding of William Windsor to Kate Middleton, the killing of Osama bin Laden, and the Occupy movements - The Time of the Spectacle makes a highly relevant contribution to the field of media and communication studies. It offers a fresh perspective on the theme of contemporary media spectacle and politics by adopting an approach that is based around critical social and cultural theory. This series gives students a strong critical grounding from which to examine new media.

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.

Combining a historical approach of Chineseness and a contemporary perspective on the social construction of Chineseness, this book provides comparative insights to understand the contingent complexities of ethnic and social formations in both China and among the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. This book focuses on the experiences and practices of these people, who as mobile agents are free to embrace or reject being defined as Chinese by moving across borders and reinterpreting their own histories. By historicizing the notion of Chineseness at local, regional, and global levels, the book examines intersections of authenticity, authority, culture, identity, media, power, and international relations that support or undermine different instances of Chineseness and its representations. It seeks to rescue the present from the past by presenting case studies of contingent encounters that produce the ideas, practices, and identities that become the categories nations need to justify their existence. The dynamic, fluid representations of Chineseness illustrate that it has never been an undifferentiated whole in both space and time. Through physical movements and inherited knowledge, agents of Chineseness have deployed various interpretive strategies to define and represent themselves vis-a-vis the local, regional, and global in their respective temporal experiences. This book will be relevant to students and scholars in Chinese studies and Asian studies more broadly, with a focus on identity politics, migration, popular culture, and international relations. "The Chinese overseas often saw themselves as caught between a rock and a hard place. The collection of essays here highlights the variety of experiences in Southeast Asia and China that suggest that the rock can become a huge boulder with sharp edges and the hard places can have deadly spikes. A must read for those who wonder whether Chineseness has ever been what it seems." Wang Gungwu, University Professor, National University of Singapore. "By including reflections on constructions of Chineseness in both China itself and in various Southeast Asian sites, the book shows that being Chinese is by no means necessarily intertwined with China as a geopolitical concept, while at the same time highlighting the incongruities and tensions in the escapable relationship with China that diasporic Chinese subjects variously embody, expressed in a wide range of social phenomena such as language use, popular culture, architecture and family relations. The book is a very welcome addition to the necessary ongoing conversation on Chineseness in the 21st century." Ien Ang, Distinguished Professor of Cultural Studies, Western Sydney University.

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 edited volume expands on what Aoyagi Hiroshi intended in the first decade of the new millennium to establish as a subfield of symbolic anthropology called "idology." It brings together case studies of popular idolatry in Japan, but goes further to provide a transcultural perspective to guide anthropological investigations in different places and times. In proposing an integrated paradigm for the growing body of literature on idols, the volume redirects recurrent questions to more fundamental points of sociocultural inquiry. Contributions from scholars conducting ethnographic fieldwork, as well as those engaged in theoretical and historical analyses, facilitate comparative reading and critical thought. Exceeding a narrow focus on human idols, the chapters shed new light on virtual idols and YouTubers, cartoon characters and voices, robot idols and cybernetic systems. Science and technology studies thus comes together with theories of animation and anthropological work on life in more-than-human worlds.

This book presents a multi-sited ethnographic study of the global development of the Taiwanese Buddhist order Fo Guang Shan. It explores the order's modern Buddhist social engagements by examining three globally dispersed field sites: Los Angeles in the United States of America, Bronkhorstspruit in South Africa, and Yixing in the People's Republic of China. The data collected at these field sites is embedded within the context of broader theoretical discussions on Buddhism, modernity, globalization, and the nation-state. By examining how one particular modern Buddhist religiosity that developed in a specific place moves into a global context, the book provides a fresh view of what constitutes both modern and contemporary Buddhism while also exploring the social, cultural, and religious fabrics that underlie the spatial configurations of globalization.

The Boomers are the generation that changed everything, from economics to politics to popular culture. This book examines the myriad ways and long-reaching consequences of the now fully "grown up" Baby Boomer generation on America. Once upon a time, the members of the Baby Boomer generation were young, idealistic, and hungry to change the world. And they did create sweeping, irreversible changes throughout American society-but probably not in the ways their younger selves imagined they would. Now that the Boomers are in their late-adult or retirement years, their tremendous legacy can clearly be perceived. In retrospect, the paths the members of this generation took to come to power-and how they came to terms with that power-are also apparent. This single-volume work supplies a broad yet detailed critical guide to the Boomer Generation, containing essays on key people, moments, and phenomena not only during the Boomers' 1960s heyday but also their extensive influences on American culture decades afterward. The contributors address key topics such as the rise of feminism; Civil Rights; the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement; the Beatles, the Grateful Dead, and rock 'n roll; gay rights; idealism, narcissism, and materialism; the influence of television on America, and vice versa; and the transition of Boomers from being "Yippies" to "Yuppies." This work is an ideal text for students in undergraduate or graduate courses in television studies, media studies, cultural studies, and American studies; and is highly appropriate as a supplemental text in literature, history, and philosophy surveys. Supplies comprehensive, critical analysis of the legacy of the Boomer Generation that examines the benefits and drawbacks of the enormous changes this generation of Americans instituted Presents accessible but rigorous, scholarly analysis from a broad range of experts in multiple fields Spotlights the ways in which pop culture at large has responded to the Boomers' influence or example-sometimes in vehement opposition and at other times with imitation or flattery

Different cultures and the specific culture manifested within them are intrinsically linked to addiction in a complex fashion which has a long history. For important thinkers, such as Nietzsche, addiction actually embodies human culture, rendering addiction and culture inseparable. This is clearly seen within the Western world's addiction to the consumption of material goods and the damage that results. Utopia has often become dystopia. Not only is an understanding of addiction key to understanding culture but to an understanding of the very act thinking itself and the way of being in the world. Addiction raises key philosophical questions, such as: do people really have a choice in their behavior, and what governs them; is it free will or predetermination? Is it biology or environment is it the external world or the internal that drives addiction, or a complex combination of both? In a contemporary context the media frenzy around celebrity addiction continually fuels public debate in this area, and this book deepens the understanding of addiction within this contentious context. This book addresses a key concern over how addiction became the norm, and it seeks to understand its dominance comprehensively. How did it come to pass that not being an addict was a transgressive act and way of being? While there has been a great deal of debate about addiction utilizing the discourse of individual and often competing disciplines such as biology and psychology, little attention has been paid to the cultural aspects of addiction. The innovative approach taken by this book is to offer insights into this complex area through a contemporary methodology that covers diverse interrelated areas. Drawing on different disciplines, offering deeper insights, from the analysis of music lyrics to empirical social science and anthropological work in AA groups in Mexico and the portrayal of the "addiction' to therapy in film and television, amongst other areas, this book addresses the need for a more comprehensive approach. Academic analysis is also given to the discourse on celebrity culture and addiction. A contemporary fusion of the humanities and the social sciences is the best way forward to tackle this subject and move the debate on. The focus of this study is an innovative interdisciplinary and intercultural approach to addiction, from the social sciences to the humanities, including cultural studies, film and media studies, and literary studies. Areas that have been overlooked, such as lost women's writings, are examined, in addition to comics, popular film and television, and the work of AA groups. This edited collection is the first study to provide such a comprehensive analysis of the cultures of addiction. Traversing cultures across the globe, including Asia, Central America, as well as Europe and America, this book opens up the debate in addiction studies and cultural studies. The important insights the book delivers helps to answer questions such as: In what way can Deleuze further the understanding of addiction through the analysis of rock lyrics? How does anthropology improve the understanding of AA groups? How can cultural studies deepen knowledge on the "addiction" to therapy? These are just some of the vast array of areas this book covers. Other areas include the condemnation of "addiction" to comic reading through an historical examination, violence in popular culture, and lost women's writing on addiction. No other book has such depth and contemporary breadth. Cultures of Addiction is an important book for those taking cultural studies courses across a range of interrelated disciplines, including English and literary studies, history, American studies, and film and media studies. This will be invaluable to library collections in these fields and beyond in the social sciences, and specifically in addiction studies and psychology.

This book develops a novel approach to peace and conflict studies, through an original application of the philosophy of Jacques Derrida to the post-conflict politics of Northern Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Based on new readings of the peace agreements and the post-conflict political systems, the book goes beyond accounts that present a static picture of 'fixed divisions' in these cases. By exploring how formal electoral politics and the informal political spheres of artistic, cultural, judicial and protest movements already contest the politics of division, the book argues that the post-conflict political systems in Northern Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina are in a process of deconstruction. The text adds to the Derridean lexicon by developing the idea of a 'deconstructive conclusion', which challenges historical understandings of conflicts at the same time as challenging their consequences in the present. The study provides a critical contribution to peacebuilding and International Relations literature, by demonstrating how Derridean concepts can be utilised to provide fresh understandings of conflict and post-conflict situations, as well as allowing for political interventions to be made into these processes.

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 Handbook is a long-needed, comprehensive examination of fair trade's multifaceted and shifting coordinates by leading scholars from a wide range of disciplines. An invaluable resource for researchers and students alike.' - Daniel Jaffee, Portland State University 'Raynolds and Bennett have done a major service with this excellent Handbook, providing a sweeping overview of the past quarter century of fair trade work and research. The book offers wide-ranging insights from top experts concerned with theory and practice, and careful attention to fair trade's gains and losses. It will be of great interest to practitioners, activists, and scholars, and bound to be a cornerstone for the next phase of fair trade work and research.' - Gavin Fridell, Saint Mary's University, Canada Fair trade critiques the historical inequalities inherent in international trade and seeks to promote social justice by creating alternative networks linking marginalized producers (typically in the global South) with progressive consumers (typically in the global North). This unique and wide-ranging Handbook analyzes key topics in fair trade, illuminating major theoretical and empirical issues, assessing existing research, evaluating central debates and identifying critical unanswered questions. The first of its kind, this volume brings together 43 of the foremost fair trade scholars from around the world and across the social sciences. The Handbook serves as both a comprehensive overview and in-depth guide to dominant perspectives and concerns. Chapters analyze the rapidly growing fair trade movement and market, exploring diverse initiatives and organizations, production and consumption regions, and food and cultural products. Written for those new to fair trade as well as those well versed in this domain, the Handbook is an invaluable resource for scholars and practitioners interested in global regulation, multi-stakeholder initiatives, social and environmental certification, ethical labeling, consumer activism and international development. Contributors: C.M. Bacon, G. Balineau, L. Becchetti, E.A. Bennett, V. Bezencon, K. Brown, S. Brown, S. Castriota, P. Conzo, E. Davenport, B. Doherty, C. Getz , M.K. Goodman, N. Greenfield, A. Herman, A. Hughes, B. Huybrechts, J. Keahey, R. Le Velly, A. Linton, M.A. Littrell, W. Low, S. Lyon, R. Makita, A.M. Martin, H. Maryanski, M. McConway, G. Moore, T. Mutersbaugh, V. Nelson, L.T. Raynolds, D. Reed, M-C. Renard, R.A. Rice, L. Riisgaard, C. Rosty, A.M. Smith, S. Smith, D. Stevis, S. Suranovic, A. Tallontire, P. Utting, B.R. Wilson

Taking seriously Jacques Lacan's claim that 'the unconscious is politics', this volume proposes a new understanding of political power, interrogating the assumption that contemporary capitalism functions by tapping into forms of unconscious enjoyment, rather than providing transcendental conditions for the articulation of political meanings and desires. Whether we're aware of it or not, political communication today targets the audience's libidinal response through political and institutional language: in policies, speeches, tweets, social media appearances, gestures and images. Yet does this mean that current power structures no longer need symbolic or ideological frameworks? The authors in this volume think not. Far from demonstrating a shift to a post-ideological age, they argue instead that such methods inaugurate an altogether novel approach to political power. Written by leading scholars from around the world, including Roberto Esposito and Slavoj Zizek, each chapter reflects on contemporary power and inspires consideration of new political potentialities, which our focus on politics in transcendental rather than immanent terms has thus far obscured. In so doing, Capitalism and the New Political Unconscious provides an original and forceful exploration of the centrality of both psychoanalytic theory and the philosophy of immanence to an alternative understanding of the political.