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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social groups & communities
How do young people survive in the era of high unemployment,
persistent economic crises and poor living standards that
characterise post-communist society in the former Soviet Union?
This major original book - written by leading authorities in the
field - shows how young people have managed to maintain optimism
despite the very severe economic and social problems that beset the
countries of the former Soviet Union. In most former Soviet
countries the devastating initial shock of market reforms has been
followed by precious little therapy. The effects have been most
pronounced among young people as only a minority have prospered in
the new market economies and inequalities have widened
dramatically. Despite an all-round improvement in educational
standards, most young people have been unable to obtain proper
jobs. Housing and family transitions have been blocked. Uses of
free time have shifted massively from the public into the private
domain. Few young people have any confidence that their countries'
political leaders will engineer solutions. Yet in spite of all
this, the majority prefer the new uncertainties, and the merest
prospect of the Western way of life, to the old guarantees. They
are prepared to give the reforms more time to deliver, but this
time is now fast running out. Surviving Post-communism will be an
illuminating exposition of the realities of post-communist life for
scholars of sociology and transition studies.
This book focuses on the level of industrial synergy development of
the Yangtze River Economic Belt in China. The main contents
include: Linkage Development of the Manufacturing and Logistics
Industries of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, Cooperative
Development of the Information Industry in the Yangtze River
Economic Belt, Coordination and Deepening of Agricultural
Development in the Yangtze River Economic Belt, Coordinated
Development of the Ecological Environment in the Yangtze River
Economic Belt, Development of Regional Financial Integration in the
Yangtze River Economic Belt, Port Coordinated Development of the
Yangtze River Economic Belt, as well as Industrial Division of the
Yangtze River Economic Belt.
Uncovers what the sociology of religion would look like had it
emerged in a Confucian, Muslim, or Native American culture rather
than in a Christian one Sociology has long used Western
Christianity as a model for all religious life. As a result, the
field has tended to highlight aspects of religion that Christians
find important, such as religious beliefs and formal organizations,
while paying less attention to other elements. Rather than simply
criticizing such limitations, James V. Spickard imagines what the
sociology of religion would look like had it arisen in three
non-Western societies. What aspects of religion would scholars see
more clearly if they had been raised in Confucian China? What could
they learn about religion from Ibn Khaldun, the famed 14th century
Arab scholar? What would they better understand, had they been born
Navajo, whose traditional religion certainly does not revolve
around beliefs and organizations? Through these thought
experiments, Spickard shows how non-Western ideas understand some
aspects of religions-even of Western religions-better than does
standard sociology. The volume shows how non-Western frameworks can
shed new light on several different dimensions of religious life,
including the question of who maintains religious communities, the
relationships between religion and ethnicity as sources of social
ties, and the role of embodied experience in religious rituals.
These approaches reveal central aspects of contemporary religions
that the dominant way of doing sociology fails to notice. Each
approach also provides investigators with new theoretical resources
to guide them deeper into their subjects. The volume makes a
compelling case for adopting a global perspective in the social
sciences.
The Canyon de Chelly is one of the best Cliff Ruins regions in the
United States. This book details the pueblo dwellings in the
region, with over a hundred black and white diagrams and
photographs. The original index and footnotes have been preserved.
Through an examination of three wooden boat workshops on the East
coast of the United States, this volume explores how craftspeople
interpret their tools and materials during work, and how such
perception fits into a holistic conception of practical skill. The
author bases his findings on first-person fieldwork as a boat
builder's apprentice, during which he recorded his changing sensory
experience as he learned the basics of the trade. The book reveals
how experience in the workshop allows craftspeople to draw new
meaning from their senses, constituting meaningful objects through
perception that are invisible to the casual observer. Ultimately,
the author argues that this kind of perceptual understanding
demonstrates a fundamental mode of human cognition, an intelligence
frequently overlooked within contemporary education.
What makes a film a teen film? And why, when it represents such
powerful and enduring ideas about youth and adolescence, is teen
film usually viewed as culturally insignificant? Teen film is
usually discussed as a representation of the changing American
teenager, highlighting the institutions of high school and the
nuclear family and experiments in sexual development and identity
formation. But not every film featuring these components is a teen
film, and not every teen film is American. Arguing that teen film
is always a story about becoming a citizen and a subject, "Teen
Film" presents a new history of the genre, surveys the existing
body of scholarship, and introduces key critical tools for
discussing teen film. Surveying a wide range of films including
"The Wild One," "Heathers," "Donnie Darko" and "Buffy the Vampire
Slayer," the book's central focus is on what kind of adolescence
teen film represents, and on teen film's capacity to produce new
and influential images of adolescence.
Islamic religious teachers (asatizah) and scholars (ulama) play a
significant role in providing spiritual leadership for the
Singapore Malay/Muslim community. Lately, the group has been cast
under the spotlight over a range of issues, from underperformance
in the national examination, their ability to integrate into the
broader society, exposure to radical and conservative ideas such as
Salafism from the Middle East, and unemployment. Reaching for the
Crescent examines a growing segment within the group, namely
Islamic studies graduates, who obtained their degrees from
universities in the Middle East and neighbouring Malaysia and
Indonesia. It identifies factors that condition the proliferation
of Islamic studies graduates in Singapore, examine the dominant
religious institutions they attend, the nature of Islamic education
they received, and their challenges. It tackles the impact of their
religious education on the spiritual life and well-being of the
community. Based on qualitative and quantitative data collected,
the book calls for a rethinking of a prevailing discourse of
Arabization of Singapore Muslims and academic approaches that focus
on madrasah education and Islam through the security lens.
During the tech boom, Silicon Valley became one of the most
concentrated zones of wealth polarization and social inequality in
the United States--a place with a fast-disappearing middle class,
persistent pockets of poverty, and striking gaps in educational and
occupational achievement along class and racial lines. Low-wage
workers and their families experienced a profound sense of
exclusion from the techno-entrepreneurial culture, while middle
class residents, witnessing up close the seemingly overnight
success of a "new entrepreneurial" class, negotiated both new and
seemingly unattainable standards of personal success and the
erosion of their own economic security.
"The Burdens of Aspiration" explores the imprint of the region's
success-driven public culture, the realities of increasing social
and economic insecurity, and models of success emphasized in
contemporary public schools for the region's working and middle
class youth. Focused on two disparate groups of
students--low-income, "at-risk" Latino youth attending a
specialized program exposing youth to high tech industry within an
"under-performing" public high school, and middle-income white and
Asian students attending a "high-performing" public school with
informal connections to the tech elite--Elsa Davidson offers an
in-depth look at the process of forming aspirations across lines of
race and class. By analyzing the successes and sometimes
unanticipated effects of the schools' attempts to shape the
aspirations and values of their students, she provides keen
insights into the role schooling plays in social reproduction, and
how dynamics of race and class inform ideas about responsible
citizenship that are instilled in America's youth.
Antiracism is a global and historical social movement of resistance
and solidarity, yet there have been relatively few books focusing
on it as a subject in its own right. After his earlier books on
racist discourse, Teun A. van Dijk provides a theory of antiracism
along with a history of discourse against slavery, racism and
antisemitism. He first develops a multidisciplinary theory of
antiracism, highlighting especially the role of discourse and
cognition as forms of resistance and solidarity. He then covers the
history of antiracist discourse, including antislavery and
abolition discourse between the 16th and 19th century, antiracist
discourse by white and black authors until the Civil Rights
Movement and Black Lives Matter, and Jewish critical analysis of
antisemitic ideas and discourse since the early 19th century. It is
essential reading for anyone interested in how racism and
antisemitism have been critically analysed and resisted in
antislavery and antiracist discourse.
The lives and futures of children and animals are linked to
environmental challenges associated with the Anthropocene and the
acceleration of human-caused extinctions. This book sparks a
fascinating interdisciplinary conversation about child-animal
relations, calling for a radical shift in how we understand our
relationship with other animals and our place in the world. It
addresses issues of interspecies and intergenerational
environmental justice through examining the entanglement of
children's and animal's lives and common worlds. It explores
everyday encounters and unfolding relations between children and
urban wildlife. Inspired by feminist environmental philosophies and
indigenous cosmologies, the book poses a new relational ethics
based upon the small achievements of child-animal interactions. It
also provides an analysis of animal narratives in children's
popular culture. It traces the geo-historical trajectories and
convergences of these narratives and of the lives of children and
animals in settler-colonised lands. This innovative book brings
together the fields of more-than-human geography, childhood
studies, multispecies studies, and the environmental humanities. It
will be of interest to students and scholars who are reconsidering
the ethics of child-animal relations from a fresh perspective.
This book shows how many previously contingent social processes
have gradually been re-organised and transformed into entangled
processes of 'discontinuance' and 'continuance' through the
implementation of digital logic. Together with the necessary
co-evolution of our collective digital literacy, this persistent
process of transformation throughout modernity is theorised here as
one of 'social digitalisation.' Social digitalisation highlights
the ways in which material digital technology, like preceding
material technologies, has been fitted into the longer term
trajectory of digital transformation. This new social theory thus
reverses prevailing accounts of the 'digital revolution' that focus
exclusively on changes allegedly caused by material digital
technology in recent decades. The book also demonstrates the
fruitfulness of applying the theory of social digitalisation as a
holistic approach in researching the wide-ranging consequences of
contemporary digitalisation, including its contrasting effects on
different social groups. It will be useful to students and
researchers of sociology, communications, media and history, but
also for general readers interested in understanding the overall
complexity of digitalisation and how digital transformation has
come to dominate the ways we live today.
This volume presents a detailed ethnographic study of rural
Paraiyar communities in South India, focusing on their religions
and cultural identity. Formerly known as Dalits, or Untouchables,
these are a largely socially marginalised group living within a
dynamic and complex social matrix dominated by the caste system and
its social and religious implications in India. Through examining
Paraiyar Christian communities, the author provides a comprehensive
understanding of Paraiyar religious worldviews within the dominant
Hindu religious worldview. In contrast to existing research, this
volume places the Paraiyars within their wider social context,
ascribed and achieved identity, religious symbolism and ritual and
negotiation of social boundaries. In arguing that the Paraiyars
help us to understand religion as 'lived', the author removes the
concept 'religion' from the reified forms it so often obtains in
textbooks. Instead, Jeremiah demonstrates that it is only in local
and specific contexts, as opposed to essentialised notions, that
'religion' either makes any sense or that theories concerning it
can be tested.
As a history of family life in the squatter settlements of Rio
de Janeiro from the 1940s to the 1960s, this study shatters the
myth of household disorganization said to be the norm among the
urban poor. Using quantitative evidence, field reports by social
workers, newspaper accounts, and the recollections of the squatters
themselves, the study dissects household structure, economic
activity, living standards, and political participation among the
one million "favelados" (squatters) living in Rio by 1960, singling
out three favelas for comparative analysis. "Favelados" prized
family life, and most succeeded in holding their households
together against daunting odds. Shantytowns provided residence
close to the workplace, and some were erected literally in the
shadow of the construction projects where the squatters worked.
Indeed, the location and economic activity of the surrounding
neighborhood largely determined the ability of the favela to
survive. As squatters became an important part of the city work
force, they mobilized to put pressure on the authorities to provide
collective services like water and electricity.
Many of the available resources for teaching courses on feminist
spirituality either come from the 1980s to 1990s or are written by
the same authors as those earlier texts, thus showing us a
progression of spiritual beliefs and practices of 'second-wave'
feminists. This is useful, but when addressing this topic with
university students it is also important to show the ways in which
spirituality has been rethought by 'third-wave' feminists. This
rethinking can be found in various small circulation 'zines, but
these are not always accessible to a wide audience. This anthology
addresses the experiences of third-wave feminists in the
construction and reformulation of spirituality. It examines the
experiences of young feminists and others who have been influenced
by second-wave feminist spirituality and engaged in developing and
critiquing themes of Goddess religion, queer theory, protest
movements, and popular culture.
This book offers a precise and rigorous analysis of the meanings of
offensive words in Chinese. Adopting a semantic and cultural
approach, the authors demonstrate how offensive words can and
should be systematically researched, documented and accounted for
as a valid aspect of any language. The book will be of interest to
academics, practitioners and students of sociolinguistics, language
and culture, linguistic taboo, Chinese studies and Chinese
linguistics.
What was lost when Kids Company imploded last summer? More than
reputations. The charitys founding vision, that there is a gap
called love in how the state responds to abused and abandoned
children, also vanished. In this book, the founder of Kids Company
lays out the thinking behind a model of care that broke the cycle
of neglect for thousands of vulnerable children. She reveals the
true scale of Britain's failure in children's services, making
public two decades of candid exchanges with prime ministers and
senior politicians to explain why the sector has not improved since
Victorian times. She also reveals the deceits used by local
authorities to stop the magnitude of the problem becoming known.
This is a book of hope, however. Calling on a plethora of moving
case histories, it presents the science that gives cause for
optimism; proof that even the most troubled young lives can be
turned around. Looking forward rather than back, the book shows how
a new model of support could be cheaper and far more effective than
existing provision. Kids Company has gone. And yet something like
it must be the future.It is imperative that the breakthroughs in
understanding that came from its work are now shared with the
widest audience. This book is an unusual collaboration between two
outstanding individuals. One author is Camila Batmanghelidjh, who
spent thirty years working with troubled families. The other is an
award-winning journalist, Tim Rayment, who was sent to investigate
Camila but decided instead that the real public interest lay in
hearing her vital, life-changing message.
The seventh edition of the highly successful The City Reader
juxtaposes the very best classic and contemporary writings on the
city. Sixty-three selections are included: forty-five from the
sixth edition and eighteen new selections, including three newly
written exclusively for The City Reader. The anthology features a
Prologue essay on "How to Study Cities", eight part introductions
as well as individual introductions to each of the selected
articles. The new edition has been extensively updated and expanded
to reflect the latest thinking in each of the disciplinary and
topical areas included, such as sustainable urban development,
globalization, the impact of technology on cities, resilient
cities, and urban theory. The seventh edition places greater
emphasis on cities in the developing world, the global city system,
and the future of cities in the digital transformation age. While
retaining classic writings from authors such as Lewis Mumford, Jane
Jacobs, and Louis Wirth, this edition also includes the best
contemporary writings of, among others, Peter Hall, Manuel
Castells, and Saskia Sassen. New material has been added on compact
cities, urban history, placemaking, climate change, the world city
network, smart cities, the new social exclusion, ordinary cities,
gentrification, gender perspectives, regime theory, comparative
urbanization, and the impact of technology on cities. Bibliographic
material has been completely updated and strengthened so that the
seventh edition can serve as a reference volume orienting faculty
and students to the most important writings of all the key topics
in urban studies and planning. The City Reader provides the
comprehensive mapping of the terrain of Urban Studies, old and new.
It is essential reading for anyone interested in studying cities
and city life.
Semiotic Sociology provides solid ground for cultural analysis in
the social sciences by building up a mediation between
structuralist semiology (Saussure), pragmatist semiotics (Peirce),
and phenomenological sociology (Schutz, Garfinkel, Berger and
Luckmann). This is a deviation from the common view that these
traditions are seen as mutually exclusive alternatives and thus
competitors of each other. The net result of the synthesis is that
a new social theory emerges wherein action theories (Weber and
rational choice) are based on phenomenological sociology and
phenomenological sociology is based on neostructuralist semiotics,
which is a synthesis of the Saussurean and the Peircean traditions
of understanding habits of interpretation and interaction. The core
issues of social research are then addressed on these grounds. The
topics covered include the economy/society relationship, power,
gender, modernity, institutionalization, the canon of current
social theory including micro/macro and agency/structure relations,
and the grounds of social criticism.
This insightful and moving book looks at how people of various ages
view the process of aging and the social and emotional perspectives
it evokes. Will You Still Need Me?: Feeling Wanted, Loved, and
Meaningful as We Age is a touching and incisive book organized
around interviews with individuals of various ages who have
responded to questions about aging. The interviewees offer their
unguarded thoughts about aging with a significant other-or alone.
They reveal their self perceptions, their feelings about the
future, their self-image as it relates to aging, and their
expectations and impressions of aging itself. They also share their
concerns that with aging comes not only possible loneliness, but
also meaninglessness and even uselessness. Psychotherapist Angela
Browne-Miller weaves the findings into a philosophical,
research-based overview of cross-generational concerns and feelings
about aging. Her book opens a window into the hearts and minds of
our parents, our peers, and our children as they look at the aging
process and at how individuals, society, and families treat aging.
Through the sensitive, up-close-and-personal, bird's-eye view of
the people interviewed for this book, aging unfolds into a deeply
moving experience, one we all share. Includes some 50 interview
reports describing people's views regarding the aging they see
around them and their own aging processes Presents a group of
sensitive illustrations and photographs by the author
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