Based on ethnographic research in Belgium, The Netherlands, and Germany, this book presents a novel approach to studying Muslim militant activism. While much existing research focuses on the process of radicalization, these authors introduce a different set of questions that investigate specific modes of activism, and their engagement with dominant discourses and practices in media and state policies. Drawing on social movement theory and Foucault's work on counter-conduct, this research explores how da'wa networks came about, and how activists developed themselves in interaction with state and media practices. This perspective highlights a form of activism and resistance in which activists turn against policies and debates centring on Muslims and Islam, while attempting to create and protect an alternative space for themselves in which they can experience Islam according to their own perception of it. The study will contribute to debates about resistance, social movements and militant activism among Muslims in Europe.

This book provides a critical academic evaluation of the 'music city' as a form of urban cultural policy that has been keenly adopted in policy circles across the globe, but which as yet has only been subject to limited empirical and conceptual interrogation. With a particular focus on heritage, planning, tourism and regulatory measures, this book explores how local geographical, social and economic contexts and particularities shape the nature of music city policies (or lack thereof) in particular cities. The book broadens academic interrogation of music cities to include cities as diverse as San Francisco, Liverpool, Chennai, Havana, San Juan, Birmingham and Southampton. Contributors include both academic and professional practitioners and, consequently, this book represents one of the most diverse attempts yet to critically engage with music cities as a global cultural policy concept.

This book addresses the educational, occupational, and income progress of Jews in the American labor market. Using theoretical and statistical findings, it compares the experience of American Jews with that of other Americans, from the middle of the 19th century through the 20th and into the early 21st century. Jews in the United States have been remarkably successful; from peddlers and low-skilled factory workers, clearly near the bottom of the economic ladder, they have, as a community, risen to the top of the economic ladder. The papers included in this volume, all authored or co-authored by Barry Chiswick, address such issues as the English language proficiency, occupational attainment and earnings of Jews, educational and labor market discrimination against Jews, life cycle and labor force participation patterns of Jewish women, and historical and methodological issues, among many others. The final chapter analyzes alternative explanations for the consistently high level of educational and economic achievement of American Jewry over the past century and a half. The chapters in this book also develop and demonstrate the usefulness of alternative techniques for identifying Jews in US Census and survey data where neither religion nor Jewish ethnicity is explicitly identified. This methodology is also applicable to the study of other minority groups in the US and in other countries.

This book will make a first contribution to identify the gaps in current practices and provide alternative mechanisms to conceptualize professionalism that is reflective of changing requirements, culture, and demographics of the contemporary military force.The military profession promotes the development, sustainment, and embodiment of ethos, which guides conduct across operational contexts, from times of national and international crises and security challenges (e.g., war, natural disasters, and peace support operations). It is imperative for military leaders to understand how ethos and doctrine shape professional frameworks, which guide the conduct of military members.

This edited collection offers an in-depth analysis of the complex and changing relationship between the arts and their markets. Highly relevant to almost any sociological exploration of the arts, this interaction has long been approached and studied. However, rapid and far-reaching economic changes have recently occurred. Through a number of new empirical case studies across multiple artistic, historic and geographical settings, this volume illuminates the developments of various art markets, and their sociological analyses. The contributions include chapters on artistic recognition and exclusion, integration and self-representation in the art market, sociocultural changes, the role of the gallery owner, and collectives, rankings, and constraints across the cultural industries. Drawing on research from Japan, Switzerland, France, Italy, China, the US, UK, and more, this rich and global perspective challenges current debates surrounding art and markets, and will be an important reference point for scholars and students across the sociology of arts, cultural sociology and culture economy.

Bringing together scholarly but readable essays on the process of gentrification, this two-volume collection addresses the broad question: In what ways does gentrification affect cities, neighborhoods, and the everyday experiences of ordinary people? In this first volume of Gentrification around the World, contributors from various academic disciplines provide individual case studies on gentrification and displacement from around the globe: chapters cover the United States of America, Spain, Brazil, Sweden, Japan, Korea, Morocco, Great Britain, Canada, France, Finland, Peru, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Syria, and Iceland. The qualitative methodologies used in each chapter-which emphasize ethnographic, participatory, and visual approaches that interrogate the representation of gentrification in the arts, film, and other mass media-are themselves a unique and pioneering way of studying gentrification and its consequences worldwide.

This volume examines the question "Do abstract objects exist?", presenting new work from contributing authors across different branches of philosophy. The introduction overviews philosophical debate which considers: what objects qualify as abstract, what do we mean by the word "exist" and indeed, what evidence should count in favor or against the thesis that abstract objects exist. Through subsequent chapters readers will discover the ubiquity of abstract objects as each philosophical field is considered. Given the ubiquitous use of expressions that purportedly refer to abstract objects, we think that it is relevant to attend to the controversy between those who want to advocate the existence of abstract objects and those who stand against them. Contributions to this volume depict positions and debates that directly or indirectly involve taking one position or other about abstract objects of different kinds and categories. The volume provides a variety of samples of how positions for or against abstract objects can be used in different areas of philosophy in relation to different matters.

Explores the role of race and consumer culture in attracting urban congregants to an evangelical church The Urban Church Imagined illuminates the dynamics surrounding white urban evangelical congregations' approaches to organizational vitality and diversifying membership. Many evangelical churches are moving to urban, downtown areas to build their congregations and attract younger, millennial members. The urban environment fosters two expectations. First, a deep familiarity and reverence for popular consumer culture, and second, the presence of racial diversity. Church leaders use these ideas when they imagine what a "city church" should look like, but they must balance that with what it actually takes to make this happen. In part, racial diversity is seen as key to urban churches presenting themselves as "in touch" and "authentic." Yet, in an effort to seduce religious consumers, church leaders often and inadvertently end up reproducing racial and economic inequality, an unexpected contradiction to their goal of inclusivity. Drawing on several years of research, Jessica M. Barron and Rhys H. Williams explore the cultural contours of one such church in downtown Chicago. They show that church leaders and congregants' understandings of the connections between race, consumer culture, and the city is a motivating factor for many members who value interracial interactions as a part of their worship experience. But these explorations often unintentionally exclude members along racial and classed lines. Indeed, religious organizations' efforts to engage urban environments and foster integrated congregations produce complex and dynamic relationships between their racially diverse memberships and the cultivation of a safe haven in which white, middle-class leaders can feel as though they are being a positive force in the fight for religious vitality and racial diversity. The book adds to the growing constellation of studies on urban religious organizations, as well as emerging scholarship on intersectionality and congregational characteristics in American religious life. In so doing, it offers important insights into racially diverse congregations in urban areas, a growing trend among evangelical churches. This work is an important case study on the challenges faced by modern churches and urban institutions in general.

Full Subtitle: When the World's Religions Sit Down to Talk about the Future of Human Life and the Plight of This Planet This short volume seeks to capture the energy and dynamism of these world religious traditions-a central force in human history and society-for illuminating and addressing major global issues: population growth, environmental destruction, freedom, the rights of women and minorities, the place of economics and work, issues of sexuality and the body. Based on consultations of leading scholars and religious leaders from a variety of traditions, and worked out in conjunction with international conferences sponsored by the Religious Consultation on Population, Reproductive Health, and Ethics, this book highlights the special insights and lessons each major religious tradition has to offer today.

This book reexamines Chinese sociology's point of departure and boundaries of western sociology from a new academic perspective, and offers a new definition of the essence and mission of sociology, drawing and critically reflecting on the ideological and theoretical theories of the classic sociologists. On this basis, it makes a careful study of the origin of Confucian classics and western sources of Chinese sociology and analyses the origin and evolution of Chinese sociology at the intersection of Chinese and western academic history. Further, it provides a deep and thorough discussion of the social theories of Chinese sociology pioneers and founders (such as Fu Yan, Youwei Kang, and Qichao Liang) and comments on Shuming Liang's sociological theory, which emphasizes the Chinese culture and tradition as well as the particularity of the Chinese social structure. In addition, it also offers an in-depth analysis of Xiaotong Fei's advocacy of the idea of expanding the traditional boundaries of sociology in his later years. With regard to promoting the development of a new Chinese sociology, the book is particularly important in terms of expanding academic research and promoting discipline construction.

Since the 1979 revolution, Iran has promoted a Shi'a Islamic identity aimed at transcending ethnic and national boundaries. During the same period, Iran's Armenian community, once a prominent Christian minority in Tehran, has declined by more than eighty percent. Although the Armenian community is recognised by the constitution and granted specific privileges under Iranian law, they do not share equal rights with their Shi'i Muslim compatriots. Drawing upon interviews conducted with members of the Armenian community and using sources in both Persian and Armenian languages, this book questions whether the Islamic Republic has failed or succeeded in fostering a cohesive identity which enables non-Muslims to feel a sense of belonging in this Islamic Republic. As state identities are also often key in exacerbating ethnic conflict, this book probes into the potential cleavage points for future social conflict in Iran.

This book argues that in the digital era, a reinvention of democracy is urgently necessary. It discusses the mounting evidence showing that digitalisation is pushing classical parliamentary democracy to its limits, offering examples such as how living in a filter bubble and debating with political bots is profoundly changing democratic communication, making it more emotional, hysterical even, and less rational. It also explores how classical democracy involves long, slow thinking and decision processes, which don't fit to the ever-increasing speed of the digital world, and examines the technical developments some fear will lead to governance by algorithms.In the digitalised world, democracy no longer functions as it has in the past. This does not mean waving goodbye to democracy - instead we need to reinvent it. How this could work is the central theme of this book.

In the twentieth century dispensationalism emerged as one of the most influential forces in American religion as well as one of America's most significant religious exports. By the close of the century, dispensationalism had developed into a global religious phenomenon claiming millions of adherents. Scanning for the "signs of the times" in current world events, scouring their Bibles for prophetic meaning, and creating vivid and elaborate stories about the end times, dispensationalists have played a major role in transforming American religion and politics. The most common contemporary form of prophecy belief, dispensationalism also plays a significant role in American popular culture (65 million copies of the Left Behind novels sold) and throughout the world, influencing movements from the Nation of Islam to global Pentecostalism. Despite its importance and continuing appeal, however, scholars often reduce dispensationalism to an anti-modern, apocalyptic literalist branch of Protestant fundamentalism. Brendan Pietsch argues that, on the contrary, the seemingly mysterious allure of prophecy belief can be understood as a form of technological modernism. Pietsch shows that dispensational thinking and practices, which emerged between 1870 and 1920, grew out of the popular fascination with applying technological methods - such as quantification and classification - to the interpretation of texts and time. The central node of this network of texts, scholars, institutions, and practices was the lightning-rod Bible teacher C.I. Scofield, whose best-selling Scofield Reference Bible became the canonical formulation of dispensational thought. The first book to contextualize dispensationalism in this new and provocative way, Dispensational Modernism shows how the mainstream, urban Protestant clergy of this time, as they began developing new "scientific" methods for interpreting the Bible also sought to create new grounds for confidence in religious understandings of the Bible and of time itself.

This multidisciplinary collection of essays provides a critical and comprehensive understanding of how knowledge has been made, moved and used, by whom and for what purpose. To explain how new knowledge emerges, this volume offers a two-fold conceptual move: challenging both the premise of insurmountable differences between confined, autarkic cultures and the linear, nation-centered approach to the spread of immutable stocks of knowledge. Rather, the conceptual focus of the book is on the circulation, amalgamation and reconfiguration of locally shaped bodies of knowledge on a broader, global scale. The authors emphasize that the histories of interaction have been made less transparent through the study of cultural representations thus distorting the view of how knowledge is actually produced. Leading scholars from a range of fields, including history, philosophy, social anthropology and comparative culture research, have contributed chapters which cover the period from the early modern age to the present day and investigate settings in Africa, Asia, and Europe. Their particular focus is on areas that have largely been neglected until now. In this work, readers from many disciplines will find new approaches to writing the global history of knowledge-making, especially historians, scholars of the history and philosophy of science, and those in culture studies.

Putting the anthropological imagination under the spotlight, this book represents the experience of three generations of researchers, each of whom have long collaborated with the same Indigenous community over the course of their careers. In the context of a remote Indigenous Australian community in northern Australia, these researchers-anthropologists, an archeologist, a literary scholar, and an artist-encounter reflexivity and ethnographic practice through deeply personal and professionally revealing accounts of anthropological consciousness, relational encounters, and knowledge sharing. In six discrete chapters, the authors reveal the complexities that run through these relationships, considering how any one of us builds knowledge, shares knowledge, how we encounter different and new knowledge, and how well we are positioned to understand the lived experiences of others, whilst making ourselves fully available to personal change. At its core, this anthology is a meditation on learning and friendship across cultures.

An interdisciplinary collection exploring the practices and cultures of mapping in the arts, humanities and social sciences. It features contributions from scholars in critical cartography, social anthropology, film and cultural studies, literary studies, art and visual culture, marketing, museum studies, architecture, and popular music studies.

A classic, pioneering account of the lives of women in Islamic history, republished for a new generation This pioneering study of the social and political lives of Muslim women has shaped a whole generation of scholarship. In it, Leila Ahmed explores the historical roots of contemporary debates, ambitiously surveying Islamic discourse on women from Arabia during the period in which Islam was founded to Iraq during the classical age to Egypt during the modern era. The book is now reissued as a Veritas paperback, with a new foreword by Kecia Ali situating the text in its scholarly context and explaining its enduring influence. "Ahmed's book is a serious and independent-minded analysis of its subject, the best-informed, most sympathetic and reliable one that exists today."-Edward W. Said "Destined to become a classic. . . . It gives [Muslim women] back our rightful place, at the center of our histories."-Rana Kabbani, The Guardian

This volume is first consistent effort to systematically analyze the features and consequences of colonial repatriation in comparative terms, examining the trajectories of returnees in six former colonial countries (Belgium, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and Portugal). Each contributor examines these cases through a shared cultural sociology frame, unifying the historical and sociological analyses carried out in the collection. More particularly, the book strengthens and improves one of the most important and popular current streams of cultural sociology, that of collective trauma. Using a comparative perspective to study the trajectories of similarly traumatized groups in different countries allows for not only a thick description of the return processes, but also a thick explanation of the mechanisms and factors shaping them. Learning from these various cases of colonial returnees, the authors have been able to develop a new theoretical framework that may help cultural sociologists to explain why seemingly similar claims of collective trauma and victimhood garner respect and recognition in certain contexts, but fail in others.

This book highlights the shortcomings of the present Digital Rights Management (DRM) regulations in China. Using literature reviews and comparative analysis from theoretical and empirical perspectives, it appraises different DRM restriction regulations and practices as well as current advice on balance of interests to analyze the dilemma faced by the DRM system. This research intends to help China establish a comprehensive DRM regulatory model through comparative theoretical and empirical critiques of systems in America and Europe. A newly designed DRM regulatory model should be suitable for specific Chinese features, and should consist of government regulated, self-regulated, and even unregulated sections. The new regulation model might be an addition to existing legal structures, while self-regulations/social enforcement also would be as important as legislation based on case studies.

Current tendencies in religious studies and theology show a growing interest for the interchange between religions and the cultures of rationalization surrounding them. The studies published in this volume, based on the international conferences of both the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, aim to contribute to this field of interest by dealing with concepts and influences of rationalization in Judaism, Christianity, Islam and religion in general. In addition to taking a closer look at the immediate links in the history of tradition between those rationalizing movements and evolutions in religion, emphasis is put on intellectual-historical convergences: Therefore, the articles are led by central comparative questions, such as what factors foster/hinder rationalization?; where are criteria for rationalization drawn from?; in which institutions is rationalization taking place?; who propagates, supports and utilizes rationalization?

Women are more religious than men. Despite being excluded from leadership positions, in almost every culture and religious tradition, women are more likely than men to pray, to worship, and to claim that their faith is important to them. Women also dominate the world of "New Age" spirituality and are far more superstitious than men.
This book reviews the now-sizeable body of social research to consider if the gender gap in religion is indeed universal. Marta Trzebiatowska and Steve Bruce extensively critique competing explanations of the differences found. They conclude that the gender gap is not the result of biology but is rather the consequence of important social differences over-lapping and reinforcing each other. Responsibility for managing birth, child-rearing and death, for example, and attitudes to the body, illness and health, each play a part. In the West, the gender gap is exaggerated because the social changes that undermined the plausibility of religion bore most heavily on men first. Where the lives of men and women become more similar, and where religious indifference grows, the gender gap gradually disappears.
Written in an accessible style whilst drawing some robust conclusions, the book's main purpose is to serve as a state-of-the-art review for those interested in one of the largest differences between male and female behavior.

Belligerent Hindu nationalism, accompanied by recurring communal violence between Hindus and Muslims, has become a compelling force in Indian politics over the last two decades. Ornit Shani's book examines the rise of Hindu nationalism, asking why distinct groups of Hindus, deeply divided by caste, mobilised on the basis of unitary Hindu nationalism, and why the Hindu nationalist rhetoric about the threat of the impoverished Muslim minority was so persuasive to the Hindu majority. Using evidence from communal violence in Gujarat, Shani argues that the growth of communalism was not simply a result of Hindu-Muslim antagonisms, but was driven by intensifying tensions among Hindus, nurtured by changes in the relations between castes and associated state policies. These, in turn, were frequently displaced onto Muslims, thus enabling caste conflicts to develop and deepen communal rivalries. The book offers a challenge to previous scholarship on the rise of communalism, which will be welcomed by students and professionals.

This book argues the crucial role of culture and cultural policies in defining the notion of urban citizenship in Barcelona since 1979. Through analysis of official documents, municipal publicity campaigns, sport - including the Olympic Games and Barcelona F.C - and film, Balibrea makes sense of the city as a global cultural destination and reveals how such transformation impacts local inhabitants. Scrutinizing municipal discourses on culture from the late 1970s, this interdisciplinary work unveils how ideas of the function and nature of citizenship articulate changing definitions of the city, from model to brand. Over the course of topics such as: tourism, social democracy and urban regeneration, Balibrea constructs an original argument for how the Barcelona image mobilizes neoliberal fantasies of subject transformation. A wide-ranging study, this book will be of great interest to scholars of urban geography, sociology and cultural studies.