This book looks at slums and social exclusion in the four major megacities of India and Brazil, and analyzes the interrelationships between urban policies and housing and environmental issues. In Delhi, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, the challenges they pose have spurred public actors into action through housing, rehabilitation and conservation programs, not to mention civil society and the inhabitants themselves. On the other hand, one must wonder whether these challenges were partly created by the deficiencies of these very public actors and civil society, be it their lack of intervention (as advocates of government intervention would argue), or the flaws and inadequacies of their actions (as supporters of the free market would suggest). Are policies alleviating or aggravating social exclusion? This book explores these questions and more.

What has been the impact of the rise of new social risks and of the recent economic crisis on social cohesion of contemporary cities in Europe? Based on original research carried out in twenty cities in ten different countries, this book provides a new, extensive, empirically-based analysis of social and economic transformations driving the emergence of new social risks in European cities in the last two decades. What are the main factors and mechanisms contributing to the rise of social vulnerability in urban contexts? What are the material conditions and coping strategies adopted by vulnerable groups to deal with these risks? And, finally, what is the role played by local welfare systems in times of welfare retrenchment at the national level? The focus of the book is on urban contexts: it is in cities that most of the new social risks are concentrated and welfare policies face the most dramatic tensions in times of austerity.

Contemporary critical studies have recently experienced a significant spatial turn. In what may eventually be seen as one of the most important intellectual and political developments in the late twentieth century, scholars have begun to interpret space and the embracing spatiality of human life with the same critical insight and emphasis that has traditionally been given to time and history on the one hand, and social relations and society on the other. "Thirdspace" is both an enquiry into the origins and impact of the spatial turn and an attempt to expand the scope and practical relevance of how we think about space and such related concepts as place, location, landscape, architecture, environment, home, city, region, territory, and geography.

The book's central argument is that spatial thinking, or what has been called the geographical or spatial imagination, has tended to be bicameral, or confined to two approaches. Spatiality is either seen as concrete material forms to be mapped, analyzed, and explained; or as mental constructs, ideas about and representations of space and its social significance. Edward Soja critically re-evaluates this dualism to create an alternative approach, one that comprehends both the material and mental dimensions of spatiality but also extends beyond them to new and different modes of spatial thinking.

"Thirdspace" is composed as a sequence of intellectual and empirical journeys, beginning with a spatial biography of Henri Lefebvre and his adventurous conceptualization of social space as simultaneously perceived, conceived, and lived. The author draws on Lefebvre to describe a trialectics of spatiality that threads though all subsequent journeys, reappearing in many new forms in bell hooks evocative exploration of the margins as a space of radical openness; in post-modern spatial feminist interpretations of the interplay of race, class, and gender; in the postcolonial critique and the new cultural politics of difference and identity; in Michel Foucault's heterotopologies and trialectics of space, knowledge, and power; and in interpretative tours of the Citadel of downtown Los Angeles, the Exopolis of Orange County, and the Centrum of Amsterdam.

What is the social structure of Chinese society in the 21st century? How should China address the problem of migrant workers? How can China form a modern society? These key sociological issues are some of the topics this book covers. This book is a collection of the research articles and lectures that Dr. Lu Xueyi, the former Head of the Institute of Sociology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has published since the 1980s. The author discusses the social structure, social stratification, social construction and development of contemporary Chinese society. Arguing that the gap between economic and social development has become the major social issue facing modern China, the author advocates paying close attention to the country's social structure and the growth of the middle-class. The book will be of interest for all scholars and students of Sociology and Chinese Studies.

This book presents a life-oriented approach, which is an interdisciplinary methodology proposed for cross-sectoral urban policy decisions such as transport, health, and energy policies. Improving people's quality of life (QOL) is one of the common goals of various urban policies on the one hand, while QOL is closely linked with a variety of life choices on the other. The life-oriented approach argues that life choices in different domains (e.g., residence, neighborhood, health, education, work, family life, leisure and recreation, finance, and travel behavior) are not independent of one another, and ignorance of and inability to understand interdependent life choices may result in a failure of consensus building for policy decisions. The book provides evidence about behavioral interdependencies among life domains based on both extensive literature reviews and case studies covering a broad set of life choices. This work further illustrates interbehavioral analysis frameworks with respect to various life domains, along with a rich set of future research directions. This book deals with life choices in a relatively general way. Thus, it can serve not only as a reference for research, but also as a textbook for teaching and learning in varied behavior-related disciplines.

An anthropological study that compares a central London neighborhood with a London suburb in terms of family and community life, mobility, social status, and social interaction. The main sources of the authors' information were sample interviews from the two populaces. The main themes of this book are the differences between the London suburb and the East End, and the differences between the middle and working-class residents.

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Teenage boys are wild about girls. When their hormones kick in at puberty, they can think of nothing else, and that's the way it has always been - right? Wrong. Before World War II, only sissies liked girls. Masculine, red-blooded, all-American boys were supposed to ignore girls until they were 18 or 19. Instead, parents, teachers, psychiatrists, and especially the mass media encouraged them to form passionate, intense, romantic bonds with each other. This book explores romantic relationships between teenage boys as they were portrayed before, during, and immediately after World War II, including - teenage melodramas: ""We'll always be together!""; Adventure Boys: ""I never knew what the treasure was...""; Henry Aldrich: ""Would you mind if I take you out sometime and buy you a milkshake?""; Andy Hardy: ""Hi, tenderfoot, drop by sometime""; Terry and the Pirates: ""I'd feel a lot better if I slept with you tonight""; superhero and sidekick: ""Come on, let's go home""; the Dead End Kids: ""They may be underprivileged, but they sure ain't underdeveloped""; the Little Tough Guys: ""Lots of guys go in pairs""; colonial fantasies: ""Stay away, this is my friend!"" ; the teenage musical: ""If there's a double meaning in that, I got it""; high school yearbooks: ""Tall, dashing, quick, and fair, spurns all girls with vigilant care!"" The author takes the reader through a rich landscape of media - sci fi pulps, comics, adventure stories, tales of teen sleuths, boys' serial novels, wartime bestsellers, and movies populated by many types of male adolescents: ""Boys Next Door"", ""Adventure Boys"", ""Jungle Boys"", and ""Lost Boys"". In Hollywood movies, ""Boys Next Door"" like Jackie Cooper, Ronald Sinclair, and Jimmy Lydon were constantly falling in love, but not with girls. In serial novels, ""Jungle Boys"" like Bomba, Sorak, and Og Son of Fire swung through the trees to rescue teenage boys, not teenage girls. In comic strips and on the radio, ""Adventure Boys"" like Don Study, Jack Armstrong, and Tim Tyler formed lasting romantic partnerships with other boys or men. ""Lost Boys"" like Frankie Darro, Leo Gorcey, and Billy Halop starred in dozens of movies about pairs of poor urban teenagers sticking together, with never a girl in sight.

In the 1970s, in his capacity as government representative from the Afghan Institute of Archaeology, Ghulam Rahman Amiri accompanied a joint Afghan-US archaeological mission to the Sistan region of southwest Afghanistan. The results of his work were published in Farsi as a descriptive ethnographic monograph. The Helmand Baluch is the first English translation of Amiri's extraordinary encounters. This rich ethnography describes the cultural, political, and economic systems of the Baluch people living in the lower Helmand River Valley of Afghanistan. It is an area that has received little study since the early 20th Century, yet is a region with a remarkable history in one of the most volatile territories in the world.

Drawing on diverse theoretical perspectives, this book examines questions of youth citizenship and participation by exploring their meanings in policy, practice and youth experience. It examines young people's participation in non-government and youth-led organisations, and asks what can be done to bridge the democratic disconnect.

This book is based on iterative multi-sited ethnography at Merrivale farm, Tavaka village, and various sites in South Africa. The author reveals how the dynamics generated by fast-track potentially offer new development opportunities - specifically for women. The findings challenge existing expert notions and opinions about women's rural land use, livelihoods, and rural development. The book examines how negotiations and bargaining by women with family, state, and traditional actors have proved useful in accessing land in Mwenezi district, Zimbabwe. The hidden, complex, and innovative ways adopted by women to access land and shape livelihoods based on transitory mobility are examined. The role of collective action, conflicts, conflict resolution, and women's agency in overcoming the challenges associated with trading in South Africa are examined within the ambit of the sustainable livelihoods framework, a gendered approach to land reform and social networks analysis.

Drawing on interviews with nurses, social workers, exotic dancers and hairdressers, this book explores the processes involved in producing and reproducing gendered and classed workers and occupations.

This collection of essays provides an analysis of Canadian/U.S. social policy toward aging. The first chapter presents a continental view of demography. Subsequent chapters examine the Canadian and U.S. perspectives on social policy, long-term care, the chronic mentally ill, rural aging, aging veterans, native elders, and cross-national intergenerational families. Current Literature on Aging This volume represents a pioneering effort in Canadian-U.S. social policy analysis in the field of gerontology. Beginning with a continental viewpoint on demography, the book proceeds to deal with seven specific topics by means of a nation-to-nation analysis. Topics include social policy, long-term care, the chronic mentally ill, rural aging, aging veterans, native elders, and cross-national and intergenerational families. The last three topics are seldom addressed in books on aging; they are a vital new contribution to gerontological knowledge in both the U.S. and Canada.

This isn't a history of Forfar. Instead it gives readers an excerpt, a sample, of what life was like on any given day of the year in a community that has been both a traditional market town and a major manufacturing centre for linen and jute. There is no hierarchy in what has been chosen - World Wars are interspersed with Church socials and cycling events, the affairs of Forfar Athletic and Strathmore Cricket club, tennis and golf. The facts and stories all have something to do with the town, and often its place in national history. Along the way, the reader will probably guess that the author is particularly interested in football, cricket, politics and the Great War. The photographs are augmented by period advertisements from local traders and tradesmen, illustrating the development of the businesses - and the demands of their customers - created by the rise of the major industries.

This book is the first comprehensive sociological account and in-depth analysis of a new Chinese Buddhist movement, known as Tzu Chi (otherwise, the Buddhist Compassion Merit Society). Based in Taiwan, it was founded in 1966 and still led by a female Buddhist master Master Cheng Yen. Its members are laity, and women play a major role. The main focus of the movement is medical charity to ease and if possible prevent suffering and to teach ethics to the wealthy; at the same time, it also offers members a religion and a way of life. Recruitment typically attracts people from the urban middle class. With some 3.5 million members and a very low drop-out rate, Tzu Chi is extraordinarily successful, and has spread to other parts of the world, not least mainland China where it is attracting the attention of the general public and the media. The book stands in the Anglo-American tradition of the sociology of religion; it also draws on the author s knowledge of Buddhist history. The data come from participant observation and many long interviews. It will be of particular interest to students of new religious movements, religious studies in contemporary China, and studies in ethics and social change in East Asia.

Teenage boys are wild about girls. When their hormones kick in at puberty, they can think of nothing else, and that's the way it has always been - right? Wrong. Before World War II, only sissies liked girls. Masculine, red-blooded, all-American boys were supposed to ignore girls until they were 18 or 19. Instead, parents, teachers, psychiatrists, and especially the mass media encouraged them to form passionate, intense, romantic bonds with each other. This book explores romantic relationships between teenage boys as they were portrayed before, during, and immediately after World War II, including - teenage melodramas: ""We'll always be together!""; ""Adventure Boys"": ""I never knew what the treasure was...""; Henry Aldrich: ""Would you mind if I take you out sometime and buy you a milkshake?""; Andy Hardy: ""Hi, tenderfoot, drop by sometime""; ""Terry and the Pirates"": ""I'd feel a lot better if I slept with you tonight""; ""Superhero and Sidekick"": ""Come on, let's go home""; the ""Dead End Kids"": ""They may be underprivileged, but they sure ain't underdeveloped""; the ""Little Tough Guys"": ""Lots of guys go in pairs""; colonial fantasies: ""Stay away, this is my friend!"" ; the teenage musical: ""If there's a double meaning in that, I got it""; high school yearbooks: ""Tall, dashing, quick, and fair, spurns all girls with vigilant care!"" The author takes the reader through a rich landscape of media - sci fi pulps, comics, adventure stories, tales of teen sleuths, boys' serial novels, wartime bestsellers, and movies populated by many types of male adolescents: ""Boys Next Door"", ""Adventure Boys"", ""Jungle Boys"", and ""Lost Boys"". In Hollywood movies, ""Boys Next Door"" like Jackie Cooper, Ronald Sinclair, and Jimmy Lydon were constantly falling in love, but not with girls. In serial novels, ""Jungle Boys"" like Bomba, Sorak, and Og Son of Fire swung through the trees to rescue teenage boys, not teenage girls. In comic strips and on the radio, ""Adventure Boys"" like Don Study, Jack Armstrong, and Tim Tyler formed lasting romantic partnerships with other boys or men. ""Lost Boys"" like Frankie Darro, Leo Gorcey, and Billy Halop starred in dozens of movies about pairs of poor urban teenagers sticking together, with never a girl in sight.

When contrasted with the miners' dramatic strike victories in 1972 and 1974, the shattering industrial defeat suffered by British miners in 1985 has been seen as evidence of the further weakening of working-class solidarity. Undertaken with complete unity, the strikes of 1972 and 1974 brought the miners substantial material gains, contributed to the downfall of a government, and reinforced the National Union of Mineworkers' position at the core of the British labour movement. In contrast, the strike in Britain in 1984/85 was marked by internal division and by the miners' attempt to resist the pit closure programme of the Thatcher government, and it ended in bitter defeat.

This ground-breaking study of the baby boomer generation, who are now entering old age, breaks new ground in ageing research. This post-war cohort has experienced a range of social, cultural, and medical changes in regard to their notions of body, from the introduction of the Pill and the decoupling of sex and procreation to the H-Bomb and Earthrise. Yet, paradoxically, ageing is also universal. This exciting book reflects the intersection of time, ageing, body and identity to give a more nuanced and enlightened understanding of the ageing process.

In this deeply considered meditation on aging in Western culture, Jan Baars argues that, in today's world, living longer does not necessarily mean living better. He contends that there has been an overall loss of respect for aging, to the point that understanding and "dealing with" aging people has become a process focused on the decline of potential and the advance of disease rather than on the accumulation of wisdom and the creation of new skills.

To make his case, Baars compares and contrasts the works of such modern-era thinkers as Foucault, Heidegger, and Husserl with the thought of Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Cicero, and other Ancient and Stoic philosophers. He shows how people in the classical period--less able to control health hazards--had a far better sense of the provisional nature of living, which led to a philosophical and religious emphasis on cultivating the art of living and the idea of wisdom. This is not to say that modern society's assessments of aging are insignificant, but they do need to balance an emphasis on the measuring of age with the concept of "living in time."

Gerontologists, philosophers, and students will find Baars' discussion to be a powerful, perceptive conversation starter.

Culture, once a center-stage concept in anthropology, is now being discussed by talk show personalities and journalists and included in a wide range of academic disciplines. In view of the myriad uses and abuse of the concept, "The Relevance of Culture" sets the record straight through a careful survey of the development of the concept of culture, and the arguments and continuing relevance of it to theoretical discussions. The authors illustrate its roles in such diverse areas as risk and technology, nursing and health care, evolution, criminology, information, economy, geography, and even the uneven the understanding of suicide.

Noted shcolars apply their wit and wisdom to illustrate and analyze the role of culture, creating a definitive picture for scholars, beginning students of cultural anthroplogy, and related social sciences.

What is the distinctive Zoroastrian experience, and what is the common diasporic experience? The Zoroastrian Diaspora is the outcome of twenty years of research and of archival and fieldwork in eleven countries, involving approximately 250,000 miles of travel. It has also involved a survey questionnaire in eight countries, yielding over 1,840 responses. This is the first book to attempt a global comparison of Diaspora groups in six continents. Little has been written about Zoroastrian communities as far apart as China, East Africa, Europe, America, and Australia or on Parsis in Mumbai post-Independence. Each chapter is based on unused original sources ranging from nineteenth century archives to contemporary newsletters. The book also includes studies of Zoroastrians on the Internet, audio-visual resources, and the modern development of Parsi novels in English. As well as studying the Zoroastrians for their own inherent importance, this book contextualizes the Zoroastrian migrations within contemporary debates on Diaspora studies. John R. Hinnells examines what it is like to be a religious Asian in Los Angeles or London, Sydney or Hong Kong. Moreover, he explores not only how experience differs from one country to another, but also the differences between cities in the same country, for example, Chicago and Houston. The survey data is used firstly to consider the distinguishing demographic features of the Zoroastrian communities in various countries; and secondly to analyse different patterns of assimilation between different groups: men and women and according to the level and type of education. Comparisons are also drawn between people from rural and urban backgrounds; and between generations in religious beliefs and practices, including the preservation of secular culture.