This book highlights various dimensions of human habitats in 21st Century India. The human habitats in the country are marked by perceptible inequality in social and economic spheres. This is occurring in tandem with rapid socio-economic transformation across both rural and urban landscapes. There is a plurality of transformative characteristics in terms of social and economic classes, gender and space. Inequality in access to natural resources such as land and water is still a big factor in socio-economic differentiation in rural habitats. This constructs a pedestal of unequal opportunities and access to basic human necessities such as healthcare, education, potable water and sanitation. Human habitats experiencing socio-spatial segregation and exclusion based on caste, community and gender are detrimental in formation of a civil society and its sustainability in long terms. The ideal situation for this would be formation of an inclusive society that celebrates age old socio-cultural diversities, reduces inequalities and reveres composite culture.

Unique among nations, America is deeply religious, religiously diverse, and remarkably tolerant. In recent decades, however, the nation's religious landscape has undergone several seismic shocks. "American Grace "is an authoritative, fascinating examination of what precipitated these changes and the role that religion plays in contemporary American society.
Although there is growing polarization between religious conservatives and secular liberals today, at the same time personal interfaith ties are strengthening. Interfaith marriage has increased, and religious identities have become more fluid. More people than ever are friendly with someone of a different faith or no faith at all. Putnam and Campbell show how this denser web of personal ties brings greater interfaith tolerance, despite the so-called culture wars.
Based on two of the most comprehensive surveys ever conducted on religion and public life in America (and with a new epilogue based on a third survey), "American Grace "is an indispensable book about American religious life, essential for understanding our nation today.

This volume offers a comparative survey of diverse settler colonial experiences in relation to food, food culture and foodways - how the latter are constructed, maintained, revolutionised and, in some cases, dissolved. What do settler colonial foodways and food cultures look like? Are they based on an imagined colonial heritage, do they embrace indigenous repertoires or invent new hybridised foodscapes? What are the socio-economic and political dynamics of these cultural transformations? In particular, this volume focuses on three key issues: the evolution of settler colonial identities and states; their relations vis-a-vis indigenous populations; and settlers' self-indigenisation - the process through which settlers transform themselves into the native population, at least in their own eyes. These three key issues are crucial in understanding settler-indigenous relations and the rise of settler colonial identities and states.

Growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, a city that he loved, Jonathan Foster was forced to come to grips with its reputation for racial violence. In so doing, he began to question how other cities dealt with similar kinds of stigmas that resulted from behavior and events that fell outside accepted norms. He wanted to know how such stigmas changed over time and how they affected a city's reputation and residents. Those questions led to this examination of the role of stigma and history in three very different cities: Birmingham, San Francisco, and Las Vegas. In the era of civil rights, Birmingham became known as ""Bombingham,"" a place of constant reactionary and racist violence. Las Vegas emerged as the nation's most recognizable Sin City, and San Francisco's tolerance of homosexuality made it the perceived capital of Gay America. Stigma Cites shows how cultural and political trends influenced perceptions of disrepute in these cities, and how, in turn, their status as sites of vice and violence influenced development decisions, from Birmingham's efforts to shed its reputation as racist, to San Francisco's transformation of its stigma into a point of pride, to Las Vegas's use of gambling to promote tourism and economic growth. The first work to investigate the important effects of stigmatized identities on urban places, Foster's innovative study suggests that reputation, no less than physical and economic forces, explains how cities develop and why. An absorbing work of history and urban sociology, the book illuminates the significance of perceptions in shaping metropolitan history.

The general store in late-nineteenth-century America was often the economic heart of a small town. Merchants sold goods necessary for residents' daily survival and extended credit to many of their customers; cash-poor farmers relied on merchants for their economic well-being just as the retailers needed customers to purchase their wares. But there was more to this mutual dependence than economics. Store owners often helped found churches and other institutions, and they and their customers worshiped together, sent their children to the same schools, and in times of crisis, came to one another's assistance.

For this social and cultural history, Linda English combed store account ledgers from the 1870s and 1880s and found in them the experiences of thousands of people in Texas and Indian Territory. Particularly revealing are her insights into the everyday lives of women, immigrants, and ethnic and racial minorities, especially African Americans and American Indians.

A store's ledger entries yield a wealth of detail about its proprietor, customers, and merchandise. As a local gathering place, the general store witnessed many aspects of residents' daily lives--many of them recorded, if hastily, in account books. In a small community with only one store, the clientele would include white, black, and Indian shoppers and, in some locales, Mexican American and other immigrants. Flour, coffee, salt, potatoes, tobacco, domestic fabrics, and other staples typified most purchases, but occasional luxury items reflected the buyer's desire for refinement and upward mobility. Recognizing that townspeople often accessed the wider world through the general store, English also traces the impact of national concerns on remote rural areas--including Reconstruction, race relations, women's rights, and temperance campaigns.

In describing the social status of store owners and their economic and political roles in both small agricultural communities and larger towns, English fleshes out the fascinating history of daily life in Indian Territory and Texas in a time of transition.

Urban One is a cutting-edge anthology that captures current South African popular culture. Seen more as moments in the lives of 15 to 30 year-old South Africans than a collection of short stories, the works send out a message that to be young and alive in post-apartheid South Africa is to participate in a freshly emerging, uniquely coloured and vibrant cultural experience. The feel is more Martin Amis than Andre Brink, Irvin Welsh than JM Coetzee. From a cross-section of young South African writers these stories present an immediate vision of life in urban South Africa.

In a critical, comparative study of the sociological literature, this book explores the term "time," and the various interconnections between time and a broad cluster of topics that create a conceptual labyrinth. Various understandings of time manifest themselves in the context of many individual social problems-there is no single vision in sociology of how to grasp time and address within social theory. This book, therefore, attempts to define an approach to the concept of time and its associated terms (duration, temporality, acceleration, compression, temporal structures, change, historical consciousness, and others). The volume is guided by a critical engagement with three main questions: a) the formation of human understanding of time; b) the functioning of temporal structures at different levels of social reality; c) the role and place of time in general sociological theory.

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by the University of Sussex, UK. How can we know about children's everyday lives in a digitally saturated world? What is it like to grow up in and through new media? What happens between the ages of 7 and 15 and does it make sense to think of maturation as mediated? These questions are explored in this innovative book, which synthesizes empirical documentation of children's everyday lives with discussions of key theoretical and methodological concepts to provide a unique guide to researching childhood and youth. Researching Everyday Childhoods begins by asking what recent 'post-empirical' and 'post-digital' frameworks can offer researchers of children and young people's lives, particularly in researching and theorising how the digital remakes childhood and youth. The key ideas of time, technology and documentation are then introduced and are woven throughout the book's chapters. Research-led, the book is informed by two state of the art empirical studies - 'Face 2 Face' and 'Curating Childhoods' - and links to a dynamic multimedia archive generated by the studies.

Social media and digital tools permeate the everyday lives of young people. In the early stages of commentary about the impact of the digital age on civic life, debates revolved around whether the Internet enhanced or discouraged civic and political action. Since then we have seen new media move to center stage in politics and activism--from the 2008 US election to the 2011 Arab Spring to the Occupy movement. We have also seen new patterns in how different sub-groups make use of digital media. These developments have pushed people to move beyond questions about whether new media are good or bad for civic life, to ask instead: how, under what conditions, and for whom, do new digital tools become resources for political critique and action by the young? This book will provide a platform for a new wave of scholarship about young people's political participation in the digital age. We define "youth" or "young people" as roughly between the ages of 12 and 25. We include perspectives from political science, education, cultural studies, learning sciences, and youth development. We draw on the framework developed by the MacArthur Research Network on Youth and Participatory Politics (Cohen, Kahne, Bowyer, Middaugh, & Rogowski, 2012), which defines participatory politics as, "interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern."

The edited volume explores the topic of experiential walks, which is the practice of multi- or mono-sensory and in-motion immersion into an urban or natural environment. The act of walking is hence intended as a process of (re-)discovering, reflecting and learning through an embodied experience. Specific attention is devoted to the investigation of the ambiance of places and its dynamic atmospheric perception that contribute to generating the social experience. This topic is gaining increasing attention and has been studied in several forms in different disciplines to investigate the particular spatial, social, sensory and atmospheric character of places. The book contains chapters by experts in the field and covers both the theory and the practice of innovative methods, techniques, and technologies. It examines experiential walks in the perspective of an interdisciplinary approach to environmental and sensory urban design by organising the contributions according to three specific interrelated focuses, namely the exploration and investigation of the multisensory dimension of public spaces, the different ways to grasp and communicate the in-motion experience through traditional and novel forms of representation, and the application of the approach to urban participatory planning and higher education. Shedding new light on the topic, the book offers both a reference guide for those engaged in applied research, and a toolkit for professionals and students.

As people grow older, cultural issues arise. Recognizing how social influences guide and restrict people leads to a better understanding of one's self and helps people as they age. Multicultural Perspectives on Gender and Aging provides emerging research on midlife issues, physical aspects of aging, and the emotional value in the context of the culture in which people are living. While highlighting topics such as elderly disabilities, quality of life, and gender dimensions, this publication explores self-esteem in older members of society. This book is an important resource for academicians, healthcare professionals, professionals, researchers, and students seeking current research on the social and cultural characteristics of growing old.

This multidisciplinary study of Scientology examines the organization and the controversies around it through the lens of popular culture, referencing movies, television, print, and the Internet-an unusual perspective that will engage a wide range of readers and researchers. For more than 60 years, Scientology has claimed alternative religious status with a significant number of followers, despite its portrayals in popular culture domains as being bizarre. What are the reasons for the vital connections between Scientology and popular culture that help to maintain or challenge it as an influential belief system? This book is the first academic treatment of Scientology that examines the movement in a popular-culture context from the perspective of several Western countries. It documents how the attention paid to Scientology by high-profile celebrities and its mention in movies, television, and print as well as on the Internet results in millions of people being aware of the organization-to the religious organization's benefit and detriment. The book leads with a background on Scientology and a discussion of science fiction concepts, pulps, and movies. The next section examines Scientology's ongoing relationship with the Hollywood elite, including the group's use of celebrities in its drug rehabilitation program, and explores movies and television shows that contain Scientology themes or comedic references. Readers will learn about how the Internet and the mainstream media of the United States as well as of Australia, Germany, and the UK have regarded Scientology. The final section investigates the music and art of Scientology. Discusses Scientology within the framework of popular culture, which is how most people outside the religion come in contact with it Approaches the study of Scientology from multiple viewpoints, enabling readers to have an informed, multicultural perspective on the religious group's beliefs and practices from which to form their own opinion Presents information about Scientology derived from one of the largest university archive collections on the subject worldwide, with a number of documents never before having been referenced in scholarship

This edited book demonstrates a new multidimensional comprehension of the relationship between war, the military and civil society by exploring the global rise of paramilitary culture. Moving beyond binary understandings that inform the militarization of culture thesis and examining various national and cultural contexts, the collection outlines ways in which a process of paramilitarization is shaping the world through the promotion of new warrior archetypes. It is argued that while the paramilitary hero is associated with military themes, their character is in tension with the central principals of modern military organization, something that often challenges the state's perceived monopoly on violence. As such paramilitization has profound implications for institutional military identity, the influence of paramilitary organizations and broadly how organised violence is popularly understood