|
|
Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social groups & communities
Roads through Mwinilunga provides a historical appraisal of social
change in Northwest Zambia from 1750 until the present. By looking
at agricultural production, mobility, consumption, and settlement
patterns, existing explanations of social change are reassessed.
Using a wide range of archival and oral history sources, Iva Pesa
shows the relevance of Mwinilunga to broader processes of
colonialism, capitalism, and globalisation. Through a focus on
daily life, this book complicates transitions from subsistence to
market production and dichotomies between tradition and modernity.
Roads through Mwinilunga is a crucial addition to debates on
historical and social change in Central Africa.
Identity is often fraught for multiracial Douglas, people of both
South Asian and African descent in the Caribbean. In this
groundbreaking volume, Sue Ann Barratt and Aleah N. Ranjitsingh
explore the particular meanings of a Dougla identity and examine
Dougla maneuverability both at home and in the diaspora. The
authors scrutinize the perception of Douglaness over time,
contemporary Douglas negotiations of social demands, their
expansion of ethnicity as an intersectional identity, and the
experiences of Douglas within the diaspora outside the Caribbean.
Through an examination of how Douglas experience their claim to
multiracialism and how ethnic identity may be enforced or
interrupted, the authors firmly situate this analysis in ongoing
debates about multiracial identity. Based on interviews with over
one hundred Douglas, Barratt and Ranjitsingh explore the multiple
subjectivities Douglas express, confirm, challenge, negotiate, and
add to prevailing understandings. Contemplating this, Dougla in the
Twenty-First Century adds to the global discourse of multiethnic
identity and how it impacts living both in the Caribbean, where it
is easily recognizable, and in the diaspora, where the Dougla
remains a largely unacknowledged designation. This book
deliberately expands the conversation beyond the limits of
biraciality and the Black/white binary and contributes nuance to
current interpretations of the lives of multiracial people by
introducing Douglas as they carve out their lives in the Caribbean.
Thorstein Veblen's groundbreaking treatise upon the evolution of
the affluent classes of society traces the development of
conspicuous consumption from the feudal Middle Ages to the end of
the 19th century. Beginning with the end of the Dark Ages, Veblen
examines the evolution of the hierarchical social structures. How
they incrementally evolved and influenced the overall picture of
human society is discussed. Veblen believed that the human social
order was immensely unequal and stratified, to the point where vast
amounts of merit are consequently ignored and wasted. Veblen draws
comparisons between industrialization and the advancement of
production and the exploitation and domination of labor, which he
considered analogous to a barbarian conquest happening from within
society. The heavier and harder labor falls to the lower members of
the order, while the light work is accomplished by the owners of
capital: the leisure class.
Trajectories of Empire extends from the beginning of the Iberian
expansion of the mid-fifteenth century, through colonialism and
slavery, and into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in Latin
American republics. Its point of departure is the question of
empire and its aftermath, as reflected in the lives of contemporary
Latin Americans of African descent, and of their ancestors caught
up in the historical process of Iberian colonial expansion,
colonization, and the Atlantic slave trade. The book's chapters
explore what it's like to be Black today in the so-called racial
democracies of Brazil, Colombia, and Cuba; the role of medical
science in the objectification and nullification of Black female
personhood during slavery in Brazil in the nineteenth century; the
deployment of visual culture to support insurgency for a largely
illiterate slave body again in the nineteenth century in Cuba;
aspects of discourse that promoted the colonial project as
evangelization, or alternately offered resistance to its racialized
culture of dominance in the seventeenth century; and the
experiences of the first generations of forced African migrants
into Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
as the discursive template was created around their social roles as
enslaved or formerly enslaved people. Trajectories of Empire's
contributors come from the fields of literary criticism, visual
culture, history, anthropology, popular culture (rap), and cultural
studies. As the product of an interdisciplinary collective, this
book will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in
Iberian or Hispanic Studies, Africana Studies, Postcolonial
Studies, and Transatlantic Studies, as well as the general public.
From Consent to Coercion examines the increasing assault against
trade union rights and freedoms in Canada by federal and provincial
governments. Centring the struggles of Canadian unionized workers,
this book explores the diminution of the welfare state and the
impacts that this erosion has had on broader working-class rights
and standards of living. The fourth edition witnesses the passing
of an era of free collective bargaining in Canada - an era in which
the state and capital relied on obtaining the consent of workers
and unions to act as subordinates in Canada's capitalist democracy.
It looks at how the last twenty years have marked a return to a
more open reliance of the state and capital on coercion - on force
and on fear - to secure that subordination. From Consent to
Coercion considers this conjuncture in the Canadian political
economy amid growing precarity, poverty, and polarization in an
otherwise indeterminate period of austerity. This important edition
calls attention to the urgent task of rebuilding and renewing
socialist politics - of thinking ambitiously and meeting new
challenges with unique solutions to the left of social democracy.
This 10th thematic volume of International Development Policy
presents a collection of articles exploring some of the complex
development challenges associated with Africa's recent but
extremely rapid pace of urbanisation that challenges still
predominant but misleading images of Africa as a rural continent.
Analysing urban settings through the diverse experiences and
perspectives of inhabitants and stakeholders in cities across the
continent, the authors consider the evolution of international
development policy responses amidst the unique historical, social,
economic and political contexts of Africa's urban development.
Contributors include: Carole Ammann, Claudia Baez Camargo, Claire
Benit-Gbaffou, Karen Buscher, Aba Obrumah Crentsil, Sascha Delz,
Ton Dietz, Till Foerster, Lucy Koechlin, Lalli Metsola, Garth
Myers, George Owusu, Edgar Pieterse, Sebastian Prothmann, Warren
Smit, and Florian Stoll.
Rural life is more complex than it is perhaps credited. This edited
volume explores several themes that highlight such complexities,
particularly in terms of what they imply for rural teaching and
learning. These themes include the geographic, demographic, and
socioeconomic diversity within and across rural communities; the
notion that rurality is not a deficit but rather a context; and the
array of novel and interesting ways to build upon rural assets and
overcome challenges so that rural students are not afforded fewer
educational opportunities simply by virtue of their zip code. More
practically, this book offers counsel for readers who may be
interested in learning more about rural circumstances so that they
can make informed and responsive decisions about policies and
programs targeting rural students, educators, and schools.
In a globalizing and expanding world, the need for research
centered on analysis, representation, and management of landscape
components has become critical. By providing development strategies
that promote resilient relations, this book promotes more
sustainable and cultural approaches for territorial construction.
The Handbook of Research on Methods and Tools for Assessing
Cultural Landscape Adaptation provides emerging research on the
cultural relationships between a community and the ecological
system in which they live. This book highlights important topics
such as adaptive strategies, ecosystem services, and operative
methods that explore the expanding aspects of territorial
transformation in response to human activities. This publication is
an important resource for academicians, graduate students,
engineers, and researchers seeking a comprehensive collection of
research focused on the social and ecological components in
territory development.
Toleration is one of the most studied concepts in contemporary
political theory and philosophy, yet the range of contemporary
normative prescriptions concerning how to do toleration or how to
be tolerant is remarkably narrow and limited. The literature is
largely dominated by a neo-Kantian moral-juridical frame, in which
toleration is a matter to be decided in terms of constitutional
rights. According to this framework, cooperation equates to public
reasonableness and willingness to engage in certain types of civil
moral dialogue. Crucially, this vision of politics makes no claims
about how to cultivate and secure the conditions required to make
cooperation possible in the first place. It also has little to say
about how to motivate one to become a tolerant person. Instead it
offers highly abstract ideas that do not by themselves suggest what
political activity is required to negotiate overlapping values and
interests in which cooperation is not already assured. Contemporary
thinking about toleration indicates, paradoxically, an intolerance
of politics. Montaigne and the Tolerance of Politics argues for
toleration as a practice of negotiation, looking to a philosopher
not usually considered political: Michel de Montaigne. For
Montaigne, toleration is an expansive, active practice of political
endurance in negotiating public goods across lines of value
difference. In other words, to be tolerant means to possess a
particular set of political capacities for negotiation. What
matters most is not how we talk to our political opponents, but
that we talk to each other across lines of disagreement. Douglas I.
Thompson draws on Montaigne's Essais to recover the idea that
political negotiation grows out of genuine care for public goods
and the establishment of political trust. He argues that we need a
Montaignian conception of toleration today if we are to negotiate
effectively the circumstances of increasing political polarization
and ongoing value conflict, and he applies this notion to current
debates in political theory as well as contemporary issues,
including the problem of migration and refugee asylum.
Additionally, for Montaigne scholars, he reads the Essais
principally as a work of public political education, and resituates
the work as an extension of Montaigne's political activity as a
high-level negotiator between Catholic and Huguenot parties during
the French Wars of Religion. Ultimately, this book argues that
Montaigne's view of tolerance is worth recovering and reconsidering
in contemporary democratic societies where political leaders and
ordinary citizens are becoming less able to talk to each other to
resolve political conflicts and work for shared public goods.
The reign of Alexander I was a pivotal moment in the construction
of Russia's national mythology. This work examines this crucial
period focusing on the place of the Russian nobility in relation to
their ruler, and the accompanying debate between reform and the
status quo, between a Russia old and new, and between different
visions of what Russia could become. Drawing on extensive archival
research and placing a long-neglected emphasis on this aspect of
Alexander I's reign, this book is an important work for students
and scholars of imperial Russia, as well as the wider Napoleonic
and post-Napoleonic period in Europe.
|
|