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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies
This book critically examines the relationship between civility, citizenship and democracy. It engages with the oft-neglected idea of civility (as a Western concept) to explore the paradox of high democracy and low civility that plagues India. This concept helps analyse why democratic consolidation translates into limited justice and minimal equality, along with increased exclusion and performative violence against marginal groups in India. The volume brings together key themes such as minority citizens and the incivility of caste, civility and urbanity, the struggles for 'dignity' and equality pursued by subaltern groups along with feminism and queer politics, and the exclusionary politics of the Citizenship Amendment Act, to argue that civility provides crucial insights into the functioning and social life of a democracy. In doing so, the book illustrates how a successful democracy may also harbour illiberal values and normalised violence and civil societies may have uncivil tendencies. Enriched with case studies from various states in India, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of political science, political philosophy, South Asian studies, minority and exclusion studies, political sociology and social anthropology.
This book stems from the 2019 meeting of the UNESCO UNITWIN international network for Arts Education Research for Cultural Diversity and Sustainable Development. It presents scholarly, international perspectives on issues surrounding arts education and sustainability that addresses the following questions: What value can the arts add to the education of citizens of the 21st century?; What are the challenges and ways forward to realize the potential of arts education in diverse contexts? The book discusses empirical research and exemplary practices in the arts and arts education around the world, presenting sound theoretical and methodological frames and approaches. It identifies policy implications at national, regional and global levels that cut across social, economic, environmental and cultural dimensions of sustainable development.
View "Public Restrooms": A Photo Gallery in The Atlantic Monthly. So much happens in the public toilet that we never talk about. Finding the right door, waiting in line, and using the facilities are often undertaken with trepidation. Don't touch anything. Try not to smell. Avoid eye contact. And for men, don't look down or let your eyes stray. Even washing one's hands are tied to anxieties of disgust and humiliation. And yet other things also happen in these spaces: babies are changed, conversations are had, make-up is applied, and notes are scrawled for posterity. Beyond these private issues, there are also real public concerns: problems of public access, ecological waste, and--in many parts of the world--sanitation crises. At public events, why are women constantly waiting in long lines but not men? Where do the homeless go when cities decide to close public sites? Should bathrooms become standardized to accommodate the disabled? Is it possible to create a unisex bathroom for transgendered people? In Toilet, noted sociologist Harvey Molotch and Laura Noren bring together twelve essays by urbanists, historians and cultural analysts (among others) to shed light on the public restroom. These noted scholars offer an assessment of our historical and contemporary practices, showing us the intricate mechanisms through which even the physical design of restrooms--the configurations of stalls, the number of urinals, the placement of sinks, and the continuing segregation of women's and men's bathrooms--reflect and sustain our cultural attitudes towards gender, class, and disability. Based on a broad range of conceptual, political, and down-to-earth viewpoints, the original essays in this volume show how the bathroom--as a practical matter--reveals competing visions of pollution, danger and distinction. Although what happens in the toilet usually stays in the toilet, this brilliant, revelatory, and often funny book aims to bring it all out into the open, proving that profound and meaningful history can be made even in the can. Contributors: Ruth Barcan, Irus Braverman, Mary Ann Case, Olga Gershenson, Clara Greed, Zena Kamash, Terry Kogan, Harvey Molotch, Laura Noren, Barbara Penner, Brian Reynolds, and David Serlin.
The 11th of November 1918, Polish Independence Day, is a curious
anniversary whose commemoration has been only intermittently
observed in the last century. In fact, the day -- and the several
symbols that rightly or wrongly have become associated with it --
has a rather convoluted history, filled with tradition and myth,
which deserves attention.
An up-close look at how porn permeates our culture Pictures of half-naked girls and women can seem to litter almost every screen, billboard, and advertisement in America. Pole-dancing studios keep women fit. Men airdrop their dick pics to female passengers on planes and trains. To top it off, the last American President has bragged about grabbing women "by the pussy." This pornification of our society is what Bernadette Barton calls "raunch culture." Barton explores what raunch culture is, why it matters, and how it is ruining America. She exposes how internet porn drives trends in programming, advertising, and social media, and makes its way onto our phones, into our fashion choices, and into our sex lives. From twerking and breast implants, to fake nails and push-up bras, she explores just how much we encounter raunch culture on a daily basis-porn is the new normal. Drawing on interviews, television shows, movies, and social media, Barton argues that raunch culture matters not because it is sexy, but because it is sexist. She shows how young women are encouraged to be sexy like porn stars, and to be grateful for getting cat-called or receiving unsolicited dick pics. As politicians vote to restrict women's access to birth control and abortion, The Pornification of America exposes the double standard we attach to women's sexuality.
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.
TV cookery shows hosted by celebrity chefs. Meal prep kitchens. Online grocers and restaurant review sites. Competitive eating contests, carnivals and fairs, and junk food websites and blogs. What do all of them have in common? According to authors Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccarato, they each serve as productive sites for understanding the role of culinary capital in shaping individual and group identities in contemporary culture.Beyond providing sustenance, food and food practices play an important social role, offering status to individuals who conform to their culture's culinary norms and expectations while also providing a means of resisting them. "Culinary Capital" analyzes this phenomenon in action across the landscape of contemporary culture. The authors examine how each of the sites listed above promises viewers and consumers status through the acquisition of culinary capital and, as they do so, intersect with a range of cultural values and ideologies, particularly those of gender and economic class.
Robots in Popular Culture: Androids and Cyborgs in the American Imagination seeks to provide one go-to reference for the study of the most popular and iconic robots in American popular culture. In the last 10 years, technology and artificial intelligence (AI) have become not only a daily but a minute-by-minute part of American life-more integrated into our lives than anyone would have believed even a generation before. Americans have long known the adorable and helpful R2-D2 and the terrible possibilities of Skynet and its army of Terminators. Throughout, we have seen machines as valuable allies and horrifying enemies. Today, Americans cling to their mobile phones with the same affection that Luke Skywalker felt for the squat R2-D2. Meanwhile, our phones, personal computers, and cars have attained the ability to know and learn everything about us. This volume opens with essays about robots in popular culture, followed by 100 A-Z entries on the most famous AIs in film, comics, and more. Sidebars highlight ancillary points of interest, such as authors, creators, and tropes that illuminate the motives of various robots. The volume closes with a glossary of key terms and a bibliography providing students with resources to continue their study of what robots tell us about ourselves. Provides readers with detailed information on popular examples of robots/AI in American popular culture Provides readers with considerable Further Reading suggestions, including scholarly, pop culture, and scientific readings on each topic Places popular examples of robots/AI in pop culture in proper historical perspective Provides scholarly material that gives readers additional important historical context in five essays Gives equal coverage to a diverse array of robots, from the well-known to the obscure
The interrelationship between fashion and celebrity is now a salient and pervasive feature of the media world. This accessible text presents the first in-depth study of the phenomenon, assessing the degree to which celebrity culture has reshaped the fashion system. "Fashion and Celebrity Culture" critically examines the history of this relationship from its growth in the nineteenth century to its mutation during the twentieth century to the dramatic changes that have transpired in the last two decades. It addresses the fashion-celebrity nexus as it plays itself out across mainstream cinema, television and music and in the celebrity status of a range of designers, models and artists. It explores the strategies that have enabled visual culture to recast itself in the new climate of celebrity obsession, popular culture and the art world to respond adaptively to its insistent pressures. With its engaging analysis and case studies from Lillian Gish to Louis Vuitton to Lady Gaga, "Fashion and Celebrity Culture" is of major interest to students of fashion, media studies, film, television studies and popular culture, and anyone with an interest in this global phenomenon.
This title examines Sub-Saharan Africa's relations with states such as the US, India, China, the EU, and Britain as well as with non-state actors. "The International Relations of Sub-Saharan Africa" is an in-depth examination Africa's place in global politics. The book provides a comprehensive and critical appraisal of the ways in which peace, prosperity, and democracy are being advanced (or restricted) by the activities of the great powers in Africa, including non-state actors, as well as who benefits from these policies and who does not. The book is a needed comparative study of the role of great powers and 'new' actors such as China and India in Africa within the wider context of neo-liberal hegemony. It fills a gap in the literature and will be of interest to any student of the continent. Its focus on external actors contributes to providing a fuller picture of Africa's place in the global political economy and how the continent interacts with the rest of the world. This is an essential work for anyone researching issues in international relations, comparative foreign policies, and African politics.
This collection of essays delves into the Coke brand to identify and decode its DNA. Unlike other accounts, these essays adopt a global approach to understand this global brand. Bringing together an international and interdisciplinary team of scholars, Decoding Coca-Cola critically interrogates the Coke brand as well its constituent parts. By examining those who have been responsible for creating the images of Coke as well as the audiences that have consumed them, these essays offer a unique and revealing insight into the Coke brand and asks whether Coca-Cola is always has the same meaning. Looking into the core meaning, values, and emotions underpinning the Coca-Cola brand, it provides a unique insight into how global brands are created and positioned. This critical examination of one of the world's most recognisable brands will be an essential resource for scholars researching and teaching in the fields of marketing, advertising, and communication. Its unique interdisciplinary approach also makes it accessible to scholars working in other humanities fields, including history, media studies, communication studies, and cultural studies.
Amputation in Literature and Film: Artificial Limbs, Prosthetic Relations, and the Semiotics of "Loss" explores the many ways in which literature and film have engaged with the subject of amputation. The scholars featured in this volume draw upon a wide variety of texts, both lesser-known and canonical, across historical periods and language traditions to interrogate the intersections of disability studies with social, political, cultural, and philosophical concerns. Whether focusing on ancient texts by Zhuangzi or Ovid, renaissance drama, folktales collected by the Brothers Grimm, novels or silent film, the chapters in this volume highlight the dialectics of "loss" and "gain" in narratives of amputation to encourage critical dialogue and forge an integrated, embodied understanding of experiences of impairment in which mind and body, metaphor and materiality, theory and politics are considered as interrelated and interacting aspects of disability and ability.
Notions, constructions, and performances of race continue to define
the contemporary American experience, including America's
relationship to Shakespeare. In Passing Strange, Ayanna Thompson
explores the myriad ways U.S. culture draws on the works and the
mythology of the Bard to redefine the boundaries of the color line.
Sex in the Middle East and North Africa examines the sexual practices, politics, and complexities of the modern Arab world. Short chapters feature a variety of experts in anthropology, sociology, health science, and cultural studies. Many of the chapters are based on original ethnographic and interview work with subjects involved in these practices and include their voices. The book is organized into three sections: Single and Dating, Engaged and Married, and It's Complicated. The allusion to categories of relationship status on social media is at once a nod to the compulsion to categorize, recognition of the many ways that categorization is rarely straightforward, and acknowledgment that much of the intimate lives described by the contributors is mediated by online technologies.
This book is an "apologia" for the rooted intellectual against the disdainful condescension of the cosmopolitan intellectual an apology in the Socratic sense of the word. It reflects the author s Texas rootedness unapologetically and offers a polemical but thoughtful indictment of the intellectual prejudice against rootedness; but it is ultimately about the universal human struggle with origins.
"Positive Peace "is a scholarly and creative compilation of articles on peace education, nonviolence and social change. Arun Gandhi (grandson of Mahatma Gandhi) sets the scene in his introduction with the challenge that positive peace is both a resisting of the physical violence of war and the passive violence of the psychological structures that lead to conflict. Peace education rises to meet that challenge. In twelve chapters, philosophers and educators look at a variety of topics from Gandhian nonviolence, to pragmatic conflict solving; hope and the ethics of belief, to the way we use violent language; mothering and peace activism, to multiculturalism and peace. Recurring themes are: pragmatic nonviolence, the ethics of care as an antidote to violence, and hope in a violent world. Chapters on the use of film in peace education, song and nonviolent activism, and teaching art history and peace, demonstrate pragmatic possibilities for would-be peace educators. Arun Gandhi in his introduction asks, "For generations human beings have strived to attain peace, but with little or no success. ... Why is peace so illusive? Is it unattainable? Are humans incapable of living in peace?" This book suggests that peace education has a large part to play. It is an important attempt to begin to meet the challenge.
Survival, the IISS's bimonthly journal, challenges conventional wisdom and brings fresh, often controversial, perspectives on strategic issues of the moment. In this issue: Barry Posen argues that Europe is better placed to defend itself militarily than many, including the IISS, have portrayed it to be Kori Schake examines the prospects of Republican politics in a post-Trump America Daniel Byman and Aditi Joshi call for protocols to curb the abuse of social media by malign agents and states Nigel Gould-Davies explains Russia's stance on Belarus with reference to Moscow's long history of involving itself in its neighbours' affairs And nine more thought-provoking pieces, as well as our regular book reviews and Noteworthy column. Editor: Dr Dana Allin Managing Editor: Jonathan Stevenson Associate Editor: Carolyn West Assistant Editor: Jessica Watson
Since the 1990s, the Chinese-North Korean border region has undergone a gradual transformation into a site of intensified cooperation, competition, and intrigue. These changes have prompted a significant volume of critical scholarship and media commentary across multiple languages and disciplines. Drawing on existing studies and new data, Decoding the Sino-North Korean Borderlands brings much of this literature into concert by pulling together a wide range of insight on the region's economics, security, social cohesion, and information flows. Drawing from multilingual sources and transnational scholarship, this volume is enhanced by the extensive fieldwork undertaken by the editors and contributors in their quests to decode the borderland. In doing so, the volume emphasizes the link between theory, methodology, and practice in the field of Area Studies and social science more broadly.
'Honorable Mention' 2017 PROSE Award - Education Practice Bringing together the voices of scholars and practitioners on challenges and possibilities of implementing peace education in diverse global sites, this book addresses key questions for students seeking to deepen their understanding of the field. The book not only highlights ground-breaking and rich qualitative studies from around the globe, but also analyses the limits and possibilities of peace education in diverse contexts of conflict and post-conflict societies. Contributing authors address how educators and learners can make meaning of international peace education efforts, how various forms of peace and violence interact in and around schools, and how the field of peace education has evolved and grown over the past four decades.
Revolution as Restoration examines the journal Guocui xuebao (1905-1911) to elucidate the momentous political and social changes in early twentieth-century China. Rather than viewing the journal as a collection of documents for studying a thinker (e.g., Zhang Taiyan), a concept (e.g., national essence), or an intellectual movement (e.g., cultural conservatism), this book focuses on the global network of commerce and communication that allowed independent publications to appear in the Chinese print market. As such, this book offers a different perspective on the Chinese quest for modernity. It shows that, from the start, the Chinese quest for modernity was never completely orchestrated by the central government, nor was it static and monolithic as the teleology of revolution describes.
How have employment relations evolved over the last decade? And how did workplaces and employees fare in the face of the longest recession in living memory? Employment Relations in the Shadow of Recession examines the state of British employment relations in 2011, how this has changed since 2004, and the role the recession played in shaping employees' experiences of work. It draws on findings from the 2011 Workplace Employment Relations Study, comparing these with the results of the previous study conducted in 2004. These surveys - each collecting responses from around 2,500 workplace managers, 1,000 employee representatives and over 20,000 employees - provide the most comprehensive portrait available of workplace employment relations in Britain. The book provides an in-depth analysis of the changes made to employment practices through the recession and of the impact that the economic downturn had on the shape and character of the employment relationship.
Long associated with the pejorative cliches of the drug-trafficking trade and political violence, contemporary Colombia has been unfairly stigmatized. In this pioneering study of the Miami music industry and Miami's growing Colombian community, Maria Elena Cepeda boldly asserts that popular music provides an alternative common space for imagining and enacting Colombian identity. Using an interdisciplinary analysis of popular media, music, and music video, Cepeda teases out issues of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and transnational identity in the Latino/a music industry and among its most renowned rock "en espanol," pop, and "vallenato" stars. Musical ImagiNation provides an overview of the ongoing Colombian political and economic crisis and the dynamics of Colombian immigration to metropolitan Miami. More notably, placed in this context, the book discusses the creative work and media personas of talented Colombian artists Shakira, Andrea Echeverri of Aterciopelados, and Carlos Vives. In her examination of the transnational figures and music that illuminate the recent shifts in the meanings attached to Colombian identity both in the United States and Latin America, Cepeda argues that music is a powerful arbitrator of memory and transnational identity.
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on bloomsburycollections.com. Attention is increasingly being paid to the conceptualization of the sustainable development agenda that should guide global development efforts beyond 2015. New trends are shaping the international environment, suggesting that the world emerging from the recent economic and financial crisis will probably be very different from the one we have known so far. The emerging issues demand new concerted responses and new international efforts, which will have to be framed by new rules and more democratic and inclusive mechanisms of global governance. Global Governance and Rules for the Post 2015 Era provides a unique assessment of global rules and governance, a reflection of how global rules have been shaping development experiences and outcomes, an identification of the shortcomings of current global governance mechanisms and innovative suggestions for reforming and improving them. The various chapters analyse whether current rules and governance structures enables the building of effective responses against international problems and promote a fair distribution of development opportunities among countries. This book is a timely contribution to the discussions on a new global development agenda undertaken under the leadership of the United Nations. It reflects the outcome of a research programme by a group of independent development experts brought together by the United Nations Committee for Development Policy (CDP), a subsidiary body of the Economic and Social Council. It will be of interest to policymakers worldwide, experts of international agencies, scholars, students and the wider public.
This book explores the theological voice of The Simpsons.Initially shunned by many in the Christian community when it made its television debut almost twenty years ago, after four hundred (and counting) episodes, and a feature-length film, few can deny that The Simpsons exhibits an astute understanding of Christianity in American culture. Its critiques of that culture are worth studying in detail. Jamey Heit's "The Springfield Reformation" investigates how The Simpsons blends important elements of contemporary American religious culture with a clear critique of the institutions and individuals that participate in and uphold that culture. Though The Simpsons is clearly a product of American popular culture, its writers offer up a well-planned, theologically informed religious climate in the cartoon world of Springfield. This world mirrors America in a way that allows the show's viewers to recognize that Christianity can hold together a family and a town that is rife with "sin," while at the same time exposing these very shortcomings.Heit focuses on distinct topics such as: god, the soul/the afterlife, prayer, the Christian ethic, evangelism, science versus religion, and faith (particularly in response to the question of why bad things happen to good people). He also explores the connections between various episodes, discussing how these connections, manifest an honest critique of Christianity in America. Engagingly written and guaranteed to appeal to smart, religiously curious fans of the show, Heit maintains that The Simpsons is not only a legitimate theological voice, but also that this voice offers a valuable addition to discussions about Christianity in America. |
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