At the end of the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of German children were sent to the front lines in the largest mobilisation of underage combatants by any country before or since. Hans Dunker was just one of these children. Identified as gifted aged 9, he left his home in South America in 1937 in pursuit of a 'proper' education in Nazi Germany. Instead, he and his schoolfriends, lacking adequate training, ammunition and rations, were sent to the Eastern Front when the war was already lost in the spring of 1945. Using her father's diary and other documents, Helene Munson traces Hans' journey from a student at Feldafing School to a soldier fighting in Zawada, a village in present-day Czech Republic. What is revealed is an education system so inhumane that until recently, post-war Germany worked hard to keep it a secret. This is Hans' story, but also the story of a whole generation of German children who silently carried the shame of what they suffered into old age.

This book discusses peer group programs and long range community efforts to rehabilitate street youth, gang members, and other youth who have low self-esteem, come from dysfunctional families, and are failures in school and society in general. Through his experience and workshops, Frank has found ways for these youth to deal with their rage and shame in a productive, effective, and edifying manner. The author shows how behavior and attitude improve when the youths learn to curb their feelings of inadequacy by building positive self-esteem. This will be an excellent tool for educators, counselors, social workers, and others concerned with troubled adolescents.

The authors state at the beginning of this provocative new book that one of the most distinctive features of the American persona is a preoccupation and underlying concern in the United States with what is or is not American.' How far can an ethnic group in the United States go to maintain its identity before it trespasses into what is perceived as un-American terrain? This is the underlying theme of Lambert and Taylor's community based investigation which studies the attitudes of Americans toward ethnic diversity and intergroup relations. Directed toward social psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and ethnic scholars, this study deals with the peculiar U.S. dichotomy of cultural diversity and assimilation.

The research is conducted in a metropolitan area among working class adults; some are established mainstream citizens, others are newcomers, but all experience ethnic and racial diversity as a daily fact of life. The authors examine the perspectives of mainstream White Americans and Black Americans. They interview ethnic immigrant groups--Polish, Arab, Albanian, Mexican, and Puerto Rican Americans--in two urban settings and offer insight to the reality as well as the exciting possibilities of multiculturalism. Students and scholars of all the social sciences will find "Coping with Cultural and Racial Diversity in Urban America" as a source of stimulating ideas.

This book presents a wealth of insights and new conceptualizations for the development of "Assistive Technologies for the Interaction of the Elderly." The book arranges the chaptersaccording to important aspects of maximizing the use value in innovation projects. Every chapter will include an executive summary reporting the main results, a storyline using everyday language, and scientific excursions, wherever useful.

The book shows how an innovation project should be structured towards maximum use value and how a project should be structured in order to make a difference. It describes the useful categorization of the large group of the elderly to maximize the focus of the innovation and demonstrates the user involvement into innovation activities. Of course, the assessment of such innovative projects is discussed as well as the lessons learned . The book also explores the business opportunities and the financial evaluation of aspects of assistive technology.

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This book analyzes three points: employment conditions for migrant workers, the impact of industrialization as part of industrial clusters upon surrounding and outlying villages, and the labour market in industrial clusters. This book examines the cases of two newly developed industrial clusters: Ludhiana in Punjab and Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu.

Volta Redonda is a Brazilian steel town founded in the 1940s by dictator Getulio Vargas on an ex-coffee valley as a powerful symbol of Brazilian modernization. The city's economy, and consequently its citizen's lives, revolves around the Companha Siderurgica Nacional (CSN), the biggest industrial complex in Latin America. Although the glory days of the CSN have long passed, the company still controls life in Volta Redonda today, creating as much dispossession as wealth for the community. Brazilian Steel Town tells the story of the people tied to this ailing giant - of their fears, hopes, and everyday struggles.

The management of interpersonal social conflict within the American judicial system is changing. Of particular interest is the trend toward informal, decentralized alternatives to the courts for the resolution of many civil disputes. A manifestation of this trend, Neighborhood Dispute Resolution or NDR offers a means of resolving conflicts in a voluntary, peaceable manner without the intervention of attorneys. Proponents of NDR say that it is economical, efficient and fair. NDR, however, may not be the panacea it appears to be on the surface, argues the author. A Marxist interpretation of recent developments in state-sponsored alternatives to courts for the resolution of disputes, this book devises a framework for exploring the relationship between disruptions in reproducing the social order of American capitalism and transformations in the capitalist state that make these dispute mechanisms possible.

Chinese Families Upside Down offers the first systematic account of how intergenerational dependence is redefining the Chinese family. The authors make a collective effort to go beyond the conventional model of filial piety to explore the rich, nuanced, and often unexpected new intergenerational dynamics. Supported by ethnographic findings from the latest field research, novel interpretations of neo-familism address critical issues from fresh perspectives, such as the ambivalence in grandparenting, the conflicts between individual and family interests, the remaking of the moral self in the face of family crises, and the decisive influence of the Chinese state on family change. The book is an essential read for scholars and students of China studies in particular and for those who are interested in the present-day family and kinship in general.

This volume examines the different and sometimes contradictory approaches of four UN human rights committees to the concept of religion. Drawing on critical perspectives from religious studies, the book combines a genealogical assessment of the role of religion in international law with a detailed textual study of the reporting practice of the committees monitoring racial discrimination, civil and political rights, women's rights, and children's rights. Arsheim argues that the role of religion within the rights traditions monitored by the committees varies to the extent that their recommendations risk contradicting one another, thereby undermining their credibility and potential to bring about real change on the ground: Where some committees view religion singularly as a core individual right, others see religion partly as an inherent threat to the realization of other rights, but also as a potent social force to be reckoned with. In order to remedy this situation, Arsheim proposes the publication of a joint general comment by all the committees, spelling out their approach to the role of religion in the implementation of human rights.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

"In this volume, Amy Best offers critical youth studies an epistemological compass, a collection of essays that spans across nations, methods, sexualities, ethnicities, generations and age, reflecting provocatively on how we create knowledge with, for and by youth. This book promises to be a classic for the next generation of scholars perched to engage critically, respectfully, theoretically and provocatively with youth, to inscribe a twenty-first century signature on critical youth studies."
--Michelle Fine, co-author of "Working Method: Research and Social Justice"

"A powerful and compelling book that represents cutting-edge new directions in critical youth studies. This is a passionate call for a critical moral consciousness that will create more humane spaces for today's youth in our complex global culture."
--Norman K. Denzin, co-editor of "The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research"

From youth culture to adolescent sexuality to the consumer purchasing power of children en masse, studies are flourishing. Yet doing research on this unquestionably more vulnerable--whether five or fifteen--population also poses a unique set of challenges and dilemmas for researchers. How should a six-year-old be approached for an interview? What questions and topics are appropriate for twelve year olds? Do parents need to give their approval for all studies?

In Representing Youth, Amy L. Best has assembled an important group of essays from some of todayas top scholars on the subject of youth that address these concerns head on, providing scholars with thoughtful and often practical answers to their many methodological concerns. Theseoriginal essays range from how to conduct research on youth in ways that can be empowering for them, to issues of writing and representation, to respecting boundaries and to dealing with issues of risk and responsibility to those interviewed. For anyone doing research or working with children and young adults, Representing Youth offers an indispensable guide to many of the unique dilemmas that research with kids entails.

Contributors include: Amy L. Best, Sari Knopp Biklen, Elizabeth Chin, Susan Driver, Marc Flacks, Kathryn Gold Hadley, Madeline Leonard, C.J. Pascoe, Rebecca Raby, Alyssa Richman, Jessica Taft, Michael Ungar, Yvonne Vissing, and Stephani Etheridge Woodson.

This handbook offers a practical guide to all aspects of planning, evaluating, and implementing student activities. This work is both a functional handbook and an instructional reference tool. After establishing a basic foundation, they describe activities in specific areas: performance activities, student leadership, and class-related clubs and trips. Sybouts and Krepel present methods for planning and evaluating, financing, using available resources, and identifying legal considerations. They confront frequently raised and often controversial questions about school activities. This comprehensive volume also provides a list of supplementary readings and a bibliography for further study.

This book demonstrates the symbolic centrality of servants in Brazilian intellectual discourse (fiction, memoirs, conduct literature, and journalism) over the course of one century--from the aftermath of the abolition of slavery (1888) to late twentieth-century maids' testimonies. It explores demeaning images of servants to examine the ways intellectuals reconciled the colonial legacy of servitude with Brazil's modernization. While the first chapters examine the discourse of 'the servant problem, ' revealing the elite's power anxieties vis-a-vis post-abolition transformations of domestic social contracts, later chapters explore new nuances of cross-racial conflicts facing contemporary servants' grassroots movements and the increase in female white-collar employment.

"Examines the linguistic relativity principle in relation to the Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk Indians"

Despite centuries of intertribal contact, the American Indian peoples of northwestern California have continued to speak a variety of distinct languages. At the same time, they have come to embrace a common way of life based on salmon fishing and shared religious practices. In this thought-provoking re-examination of the hypothesis of linguistic relativity, Sean O'Neill looks closely at the Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk peoples to explore the striking juxtaposition between linguistic diversity and relative cultural uniformity among their communities.

O'Neill examines intertribal contact, multilingualism, storytelling, and historical change among the three tribes, focusing on the traditional culture of the region as it existed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He asks important historical questions at the heart of the linguistic relativity hypothesis: Have the languages in fact grown more similar as a result of contact, multilingualism, and cultural convergence? Or have they instead maintained some of their striking grammatical and semantic differences? Through comparison of the three languages, O'Neill shows that long-term contact among the tribes intensified their linguistic differences, creating unique Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk identities.

If language encapsulates worldview, as the principle of linguistic relativity suggests, then this region's linguistic diversity is puzzling. Analyzing patterns of linguistic accommodation as seen in the semantics of space and time, grammatical classification, and specialized cultural vocabularies, O'Neill resolves the apparent paradox by assessing long-term effects of contact.

The growing number of elder men providing hands-on care to loved ones, particularly spouses, undeniably represents a hidden segment of the home care population. With that in consideration, caregiving in communities of color, in particular, is increasing while numbers of informal (unpaid) caregivers are projected to triple by 2030. Despite statistics, studies on African-American men who care for other elders (such as spouses and parents) - indeed, "the hidden among the hidden" - are negligible. This text follows a study conducted by Helen Black, a research scientist focusing on aging, alongside John Groce and Charles Harmon, founders of Mature Africans Learning from Each Other (M.A.L.E.), in which they interviewed elderly African-American men in caregiver roles. As a whole, The Hidden Among the Hidden is unique in its study of caregiving in the areas of subject matter, methodology, and presentation of findings. The men whose attitudes and behaviors toward caregiving are recorded in this book share a wealth of knowledge for other caregivers, gerontologists, healthcare professionals, students, and the community in general.

This volume provides a novel and relational sociological approach to the study of EU civil society. It focuses on the interactions and interrelations between civil society actors and the forms of capital that structure the fields and sub-fields of EU civil society, through new and important empirical studies on organized EU civil society.

The radio in Africa has shaped culture by allowing listeners to negotiate modern identities and sometimes fast-changing lifestyles. Through the medium of voice and mediated sound, listeners on the station – known as Radio Bantu, then Radio Zulu, and finally Ukhozi FM – shaped new understandings of the self, family and social roles.

Through particular genres such as radio drama, fuelled by the skills of radio actors and listeners, an array of debates, choices and mistakes were unpacked daily for decades. This was the unseen literature of the auditory, the drama of the airwaves, which at its height shaped the lives of millions of listeners in urban and rural places in South Africa. Radio became a conduit for many talents squeezed aside by apartheid repression. Besides Winnie Mahlangu and K.E. Masinga and a host of other talents opened by radio, the exiles Lewis Nkosi and Bloke Modisane made a niche and a network of identities and conversations which stretched from the heart of Harlem to the American South. Nkosi and Modisane were working respectively in BBC Radio drama and a short-lived radio transcription centre based in London which drew together the threads of activism and creativity from both Black America and the African continent at a critical moment of the late empire.

Radio Soundings is a fascinating study that shows how, throughout its history, Zulu radio has made a major impact on community, everyday life and South African popular culture, voicing a range of subjectivities which gave its listeners a place in the modern world.

Religion and society

Volume 1 2010

"Religion and Society" responds to the need for a rigorous, in-depth review of current work in the expanding sub-discipline of the anthropology of religion. In addition, this important annual aims to provide a dynamic snapshot of developments in the study of religion as a whole and encourages inter-disciplinary perspectives.

Each issue contains a profile of a senior scholar of religion, alongside invited papers produced by authorities in their respective sub-fields. The contributions will provide overviews of a given topic with critical, "positioned" views of the subject and of relevant research. In the "Debate Topic" section a scholar of religion will reflect on a high profile issue or event and a "Reflections on a Text" feature will invite discussants to comment on a recently published volume, followed by a response from the author. Other sections will cover teaching the anthropology of religion, news and conferences, and-vitally-reviews of new books and ethnographic films."

What rallies or inspires people to champion the different causes surrounding filtering or free expression? How do people vary in their views on what the First Amendment guarantees? This book encourages students to think critically about the pros and cons of censorship. The profiles of individuals who are active in free speech debates show that while there aren't always black and white answers, there are numerous ways to take a firm stand on the issues.

Readers will be introduced to a wide variety of people, from feminists arguing both sides of the debate over pornography, to those who believe no one can clearly define what is harmful and what is not. The book also presents people motivated by religious convictions to censor material they consider negative or detrimental. Fifty individual stories about activists on frontlines, fighting for what they believe, bring the controversies surrounding filtering and freedom of expression into sharp focus, offering a rich platform for consideration and debate.

More than any other textbook on the market, "Play and Child Development, Fourth Edition," ties play directly to child development. The authors address the full spectrum of play-related topics and seamlessly blend research, theory, and practical applications throughout this developmentally-based resource. Readers will learn about historical, theoretical, and practical approaches to promoting development through integrated play and learning approaches across various age or developmental levels. The book analyzes play theories and play therapy; presents a history of play; and discusses current play trends. It explores ways to create safe play environments for all children, and how to weave play into school curricula. Finally, the authors examine the role of adults in leading and encouraging children's natural tendencies toward learning by playing. Special coverage includes a full chapter on play and children with disabilities, and the value of field trips in supporting learning. This edition offers expanded and/or updated coverage on evidence based play theory, child development, play environments, and early play-based curricula for children of all abilities in various learning contexts. All content in the text is purposefully arranged to guide its readers through key and core topics leading to a comprehensive understanding of play intended to help prepare pre-service teachers to lead and support children's play in a number of contexts: preschools, elementary schools, park systems, and research programs.

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?

If the urban imagination has been traditionally masculine, this book shifts attention to the role of the city and its processes of mutual transformation in poetry by women writers. By turns challenging, rebellious, utopian and sceptical, some of the most richly experimental poetry is currently being written by women. This book offers readings of their work informed by theorizations of the city, as well as looking at how their innovations in language and form enable new visions of urban space. It addresses key issues in the imagining of the contemporary city and its global relationships, including changing understandings of the body and embodied space in technologized urban environments and the role of cohabiting languages in creating new forms of polis.

Care for the elderly has increased in both duration and intensity, particularly because of better medical conditions resulting in increased lifespan. Thus understanding the numerous dimensions of ageing will play a consequential role in determining future national policies. This book addresses a wide spectrum of issues faced by the elderly in India, Sri Lanka and the Netherlands, primarily from social and economic perspectives. South Asian cultures more than others have traditionally endorsed living arrangements that entail co-residence of aged parents with their children, which has been the crux of the support system of the aged. Significant shifts in family structure spurred by modernization prompted increased family nucleation.

All three countries offer interesting insights as India is projected to have an ageing population of 90 million in the near future, and Sri Lanka has one of the highest proportions of ageing people in the developing world. By delving further, one can view these trends in the context of widespread poverty and inadequate social security systems in India, and high human development indicators in Sri Lanka.