The sexualization of girls has captured the attention of the media, advocacy groups and politicians in recent years. This prolific discourse sets alarm bells ringing: sexualization is said to lead to depression, promiscuity and compassion deficit disorder, and rob young girls of their childhood. However, measuring such claims against a wide range of data sources reveals a far more complicated picture.

"Becoming Sexual" begins with a simple question: why does this discourse feel so natural? Analyzing potent cultural and historical assumptions, and subjecting them to measured investigation, R. Danielle Egan illuminates the implications of dominant thinking on sexualization. The sexualized girl functions as a metaphor for cultural decay and as a common enemy through which adult rage, discontent and anxiety regarding class, gender, sexuality, race and the future can be expressed. Egan argues that, ultimately, the popular literature on sexualization is more reflective of adult disquiet than it is about the lives and practices of girls.

"Becoming Sexual" will be a welcome intervention into these fraught polemics for anyone interested in engaging with a high-profile contemporary debate, and will be particularly useful for students of sociology, cultural studies, childhood studies, gender studies and media studies.

How do you sufficiently progress beyond the status quo when an entire rural community views the status quo as sufficient progress? Educating children in poverty remains the most important educational challenge of our time. What few people know is this: the rate of child poverty in our nation's rural communities is actually higher than it is in our country's urban centers. Hardball Leadership is a best practices guide for rural school leaders who are passionate about closing the achievement gap and committed to leading their districts to significant academic improvement. Based upon original research that examined the leadership practices of effective rural superintendents who led their districts to dramatic academic improvement, this book's insights include: *Establishing a strong academic culture where every student can and will be successful *Developing a system for improving teacher instructional performance *Fostering an academically-focused partnership with the board of education *Managing school-based controversy in a productive way *Building and sustaining a financially strong district This leadership handbook will help rural school leaders build an academic pathway that will lead their students towards a happy and prosperous life.

Community Informatics: Enabling Communities with Information and Communications Technologies provides an introduction to the community use of information and communications technologies, an overview of the various areas in which ICT is impacting local development and a set of case studies of CI.

Social Welfare, Aging and Social Theory explores how we can understand the changing relationship between social welfare and human aging. The book begins by reviewing how historical changes in society impacted on shaping emergence of scientific approaches to understand and problematize and bio-medicalize aging as akin to an illness and disease. The discussion moves to trace how particular social science theories were developed to reinforce negative perceptions of aging. The book also develops its own reflexive approach with in-depth examples of social welfare in national, international and global contexts in how aging is theorized in the postmodern world were alternative possibilities can be encountered.

A fascinating portrait of the turbulent political, social, and cultural life of the city of Berlin in the 1920s.

For about a decade, one of the most influential forces in US anti-immigrant politics was the Minuteman Project. The armed volunteers made headlines patrolling the southern border. What drove their ethno-nationalist politics? Jennifer L. Johnson spent hundreds of hours observing and interviewing Minutemen, hoping to answer that question. She reached surprising conclusions. While the public face of border politics is hypermasculine-men in uniforms, fatigues, and suits-older women were central to the Minutemen. Women mobilized support and took part in border missions. These women compel us to look beyond ideological commitments and material benefits in seeking to understand the appeal of right-wing politics. Johnson argues that the women of the Minutemen were motivated in part by the gendered experience of aging in America. In a society that makes old women irrelevant, aging white women found their place through anti-immigrant activism, which wedded native politics to their concern for the safety of their families. Grandmothers on Guard emphasizes another side of nationalism: the yearning for inclusion. The nation the Minutemen imagined was not only a space of exclusion but also one in which these women could belong.

The focus of this book is on Chinese immigration in the past two decades and its spatial manifestations in Britain. A major argument in this study is that if the 1980s can be recorded as a turning point in the history of Chinese immigration to Britain because the decade marked a substantial increase in and a diversity of Chinese immigrants, it should also be considered a landmark in contemporary British urban history as it featured a major transformation in the Chinese urban landscape. This book examines how changes in the contexts of exit and reception have stimulated quantitative and qualitative changes in Chinese immigration, and how these changes in immigration facilitate the development of Chinatowns and Chinese settlements.

This book is motivated by our work with students and their families in urban communities, and the urgent imperative to address the endemic educational and societal inequities that pervade the lives of urban students, particularly those who live in poverty, are of minority and immigrant backgrounds, and are otherwise marginalized within current educational discourses and practices. In spite of the fact that over the last three decades policy makers, educators and communities across the globe have called for in-depth structural adjustments to urban education, these changes are rarely evidenced in the academic and practitioner spheres. On the contrary, guided by normative assumptions that ignore the realties of students' lives, narrow outsider notions of what ought to be continue to focus on deviance and constrain urban students within restrictive boundaries. These underlying discourses, in the form of deficit beliefs, thoughts, and actions, shape urban research, theory, and practice and blind prospective change agents to students' strengths, and delimit the transformative potential of social justice praxis within urban environments. This volume brings together a range of scholars from Canada and the United States that present a variety of different lenses on issues of diversity, equity and social justice in urban schools. Their analyses highlight the richness and complexity of urban education, and illustrate how multiple theoretical and practical configurations of difference impact students, their families and communities, and facilitate or hinder the creation of inclusionary learning environments.

In this book, David Brandt examines the legal, psychological, and cultural issues relevant to understanding antisocial behaviour in adolescence. Based on his own research and a broad analysis of recent work in the field, Brandt identifies the factors that are common in cases of delinquency. The discussion considers the long-term effects of social issues such as poverty as well as psychological issues such as the high levels of stress and anxiety suffered during childhood by many delinquents. He shows how a failure to meet the developmental needs of children - at both the family level and at a broader social and political level - is at the core of the problem of juvenile delinquency. Brandt concludes with an inquiry into how best to prevent delinquency. Programmes that address the developmental needs of children, Brandt argues, are more effective than policing, juvenile courts, or incarceration.

In this book, film scholars, anthropologists, and critics discuss star-making in the contemporary Hindi-language film industry in India, also known as "Bollywood." Drawing on theories of stardom, globalization, transnationalism, gender, and new media studies, the chapters explore contemporary Hindi film celebrity. With the rise of social media and India's increased engagement in the global economy, Hindi film stars are forging their identities not just through their on-screen images and magazine and advertising appearances, but also through an array of media platforms, product endorsements, setting fashion trends, and involvement in social causes. Focusing on some of the best-known Indian stars since the late 1990s, the book discusses the multiplying avenues for forging a star identity, the strategies industry outsiders adopt to become stars, and the contradictions and conflicts that such star-making produces. It addresses questions such as: What traits of contemporary stars have contributed most to longevity and success in the industry? How has filmmaking technology and practice altered the nature of stardom? How has the manufacture of celebrity altered with the recent appearance of commodity culture in India and the rise of a hyper-connected global economy? By doing so, it describes a distinct moment in India and in the world in which stars and stardom are drawn more closely than ever into the vital events of global culture. Hindi films and their stars are part of the national and global entertainment circuits that are bigger and more competitive than ever. As such, this is a timely book creates opportunities for examining stardom in other industries and provides fruitful cross-cultural perspectives on star identities today. "Grounded in rigorous scholarship as well as a palpable love of Hindi cinema, this collection of 19 essays on a dizzying array of contemporary Hindi film stars makes for an informative, thought-provoking, illuminating, and most of all, a joyful read. Pushing boundaries of not only global Star Studies but also film theory as a whole, this de-colonised and de-colonising volume is a must read for film scholars, students and cinephiles!" Dr. Sunny Singh, Senior Lecturer - Creative Writing and English Literature, Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture & Design, London Metropolitan University "A wide-ranging overview of Hindi cinema's filmi firmament today, focussing on its most intriguing and brightest-burning stars. The variety of approaches to stardom and celebrity by both established and upcoming scholars reveals a web of interconnecting stories and concerns that provide fascinating new insights into the workings of today's Hindi film industry, while shining fresh light on contemporary India and the world we live in." Professor Rosie Thomas, Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), College of Design, Creative and Digital Industries, University of Westminster

This book carries an ethnographic signature in approach and style, and is an examination of a small Brooklyn, New York, African-American, Pentecostal church congregation and is based on ethnographic notes taken over the course of four years. The Pentecostal Church is known to outsiders almost exclusively for its members' "bizarre" habit of speaking in tongues. This ethnography, however, puts those outsiders inside the church pews, as it paints a portrait of piety, compassion, caring, love-all embraced through an embodiment perspective, as the church's members experience these forces in the most personal ways through religious conversion. Central themes include concerns with the notion of "spectacle" because of the grand bodily display that is highlighted by spiritual struggle, social aspiration, punishment and spontaneous explosions of a variety of emotions in the public sphere. The approach to sociology throughout this work incorporates the striking dialectic of history and biography to penetrate and interact with religiously inspired residents of the inner-city in a quest to make sense both empirically and theoretically of this rapidly changing, surprising and highly contradictory late-modern church scene. The focus on the individual process of becoming Pentecostal provides a road map into the church and canvasses an intimate view into the lives of its members, capturing their stories as they proceed in their Pentecostal careers. This book challenges important sociological concepts like crisis to explain religious seekership and conversion, while developing new concepts such as "God Hunting" and "Holy Ghost Capital" to explain the process through which individuals become tongue-speaking Pentecostals. Church members acquire "Holy Ghost Capital" and construct a Pentecostal identity through a relationship narrative to establish personal status and power through conflicting tongue-speaking ideas. Finally, this book examines the futures of the small and large, institutionally affiliated Pentecostal Church and argues that the small Pentecostal Church is better able to resist modern rationalizing forces, retaining the charisma that sparked the initial religious movement. The power of charisma in the small church has far-reaching consequences and implications for the future of Pentecostalism and its followers.

Our efforts to sustain our communities, and the natural environments that support them, are challenged by our ability to communicate effectively between our different forms of knowledge. Respect for diversity and difference, drawing upon all our methods of inquiry, advocacy, and learning to find common ground, are all part of the integrative approach needed to address the complexity of the challenges we face. This conference was an opportunity for practitioners from broad ranging traditions to share their experiences regarding integrative and innovative approaches that can make a difference.

This book explores the reality of ageing and old age from the perspectives of the individual and society. It emphasizes cross-cultural aspects of ageing and communication issues both within and across generations. The authors approach the understanding of ageing from a multi-disciplinary perspective, integrating biology, psychology, linguistics, sociology, and history. The book is organized as follows: historical and broader cross-cultural issues of ageing, followed by biomedical, psychological, social, and communicative aspects of ageing. The book concludes with an in-depth analysis of the existential dimension of ageing followed by an evolutionary perspective.

This book examines the implications of rural residence for adolescents and families in the United States, addressing both the developmental and mental health difficulties they face. Special attention is given to the unique circumstances of minority families residing in rural areas and how these families navigate challenges as well as their sources of resilience. Chapters describe approaches for enhancing the well-being of rural minority youth and their families. In addition, chapters discuss the challenges of conducting research within rural populations and propose new frameworks for studying these diverse communities. Finally, the volume offers recommendations for reducing the barriers to health and positive development in rural settings. Featured topics include: Changes in work and family structures in the rural United States. Rural job loss to offshoring and automation. The opioid crisis in the rural United States. Prosocial behaviors in rural U.S. Latino/a youth. Demographic changes across nonmetropolitan areas. Rural Families and Communities in the United States is a must-have resource for researchers, professors, clinicians, professionals, and graduate students in developmental psychology, family studies, public health as well as numerous interrelated disciplines, including sociology, demography, social work, prevention science, educational policy, political science, and economics.

This book examines place and place-making in London's Borough Market. In particular, it uses topo/graphy ('place-writing) to interrogate the ways in which Borough Market's material, social-sensual and discursive relations assemble to reproduce Borough Market as a place, market and marketplace. Its central premise is that market-processes - the negotiation and exchange of commodities -are place-processes. This means that the often-abstract relationships that ultimately define what we think of as the economy are embedded in the rich and every materiality, sociality, sensuality and meanings associated with place. By tracing out these different elements, topo/graphy illustrates the ways in which economic reproduction is grounded in particular and often discrete practices. However, by assembling them together, this highlights the ways in which place and place-making are the driving force behind the economy at large.

This comprehensive literature review presents key contributions to the topic of regional economic advantage. It helps the reader to understand how regions build advantage for industrial development through the use of endogenous and exogenous resources, how regional industrial development can be supported by place-based policy, and how the form and mechanisms of regional advantage change over time in a path dependent manner. Also analysed is research on industrial districts and new industrial spaces, as well as regional clusters and innovation systems, along with more recent discussion of global development impulses and evolutionary perspectives on regional development. Written by three experts in the field, this important review is an essential resource for those studying, researching or practicing in this area.

Culture maverick Jim Goad presents a thoroughly reasoned, darkly funny, and rampagingly angry defense of America's most maligned social group -- the cultural clan variously referred to as rednecks, hillbillies, white trash, crackers, and trailer trash. As The Redneck Manifesto boldly points out and brilliantly demonstrates, America's dirty little secret isn't racism but classism. While pouncing incessantly on racial themes, most major media are silent about America's widening class rifts, a problem that negatively affects more people of all colors than does racism. With an unmatched ability for rubbing salt in cultural wounds, Jim Goad deftly dismantles most popular American notions about race and culture and takes a sledgehammer to our delicate glass-blown popular conceptions of government, religion, media, and history.

The focus of this book is the journey babies have made over the past century. The rise of the middle class in America dictated major changes in the ways babies were fed, cared for, and raised. Social programs focused on improving water and sanitation programs for all, which led directly to decreased infection among infants and improved morbidity and mortality rates. Other programs also focused attention on babies. Advances in medicine allowed infants to be immunized against once-deadly and disabling diseases and to survive congenital defects, premature birth, and infectious disease. Physicians helped infertile couples conceive and carry a baby to term. Prenatal care helped mothers give birth to a healthy baby. Early intervention services gave infants an advantage as they faced growing up in the modern era. Today, most American babies are better off than they were in 1901. Overall they are bigger, healthier, and much more likely to survive the first year. But challenges remain. By reviewing the events of the past century, Reedy hopes we can make even more of a difference in the lives of American babies in the century to come. In 1900, most babies were born at home. Infant mortality was high and most families could expect to lose one or more of their babies within the first year of life. A family was expected to have babies, and they were certainly wanted in most situations, however, they did not generally receive the attention they do today. In the early years of the 21st century, the birth of a baby is a time of joy for most parents and extended families. Birth occurs most often in a hospital delivery room with the father and sometimes other family members present. While the infant mortality rate in the United States still lags behind many other developed countries, it has significantly improved over the past century, and infant death is not a family expectation. The main focus of this book is the journey babies have made over the past century. The rise of the middle class in America dictated major changes in the ways babies were fed, cared for, and raised. No longer a financial necessity as in an agrarian society, babies became a symbol of middle class prosperity and parents basked in the reflected glow. Social programs, authorized and regulated by federal and state government, became a reality. Progressive Era reformers focused on improving water and sanitation programs for all, which led directly to decreased infection among infants and improved the dismal morbidity and mortality rates prevalent among all social classes. Other programs, such as the Shepard-Towner Act, the Social Security Act, and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society initiatives also focused attention on babies. Advances in medicine allowed infants to be immunized against once-deadly and disabling diseases and to survive congenital defects, premature birth, and infectious disease. Physicians discovered the means to help infertile couples conceive and carry a baby to term. Prenatal care helped mothers prepare for the birth of a healthy baby. Early intervention services by educators, social workers, and others gave infants an advantage as they faced growing up in the modern era. At the beginning of the 21st century, most American babies are better off than they were in 1901. Overall they are bigger, healthier, and much more likely to survive the first year. But challenges remain. By reviewing the events of the past century, Reedy hopes we can make even more of a difference in the lives of American babies in the century to come.

This book describes a participatory case study of a small family farm in Maharashtra, India. It is a dialectical study of cultivating cultivation: how paddy cultivation is learnt and taught, and why it is the way it is. The paddy cultivation that the family is doing at first appears to be 'traditional'. But by observation and working along with the family, the authors have found that they are engaging in a dynamic process in which they are questioning, investigating, and learning by doing. The authors compare this to the process of doing science, and to the sort of learning that occurs in formal education. The book presents evidence that paddy cultivation has always been varying and evolving through chance and necessity, experimentation, and economic contingencies. Through the example of one farm, the book provides a critique of current attempts to sustain agriculture, and an understanding of the ongoing agricultural crisis.