|
|
Books > Social sciences
Written from the perspective of a librarian, this book offers a
comprehensive overview of the impact of e-books on academic
libraries. The author discusses advantages to both researchers and
librarians and provides current examples of innovative uses of
e-books in academic contexts. This book reviews the current
situation in e-book publishing, and describes problems in managing
e-books in libraries caused by the variety of purchase models and
varying formats available, and the lack of standardisation. It
discusses solutions for providing access and maintaining
bibliographic control, looks at various initiatives to publicise
and promote e-books, and compares e-book usage surveys to track
changes in user preferences and behaviour over the last decade.
E-books have already had a huge impact on academic libraries, and
major advances in technology will bring further changes. There is a
need for collaboration between libraries and publishers. The book
concludes with reflections on the future of e-books in academic
libraries.
Describes how e-books have changed library services and how they
have enabled academic libraries to align with the e-learning
initiatives of their universitiesDiscusses problems with e-book
collection development and management and lists examples of
solutionsExamines trends in user behaviour and acceptance of
e-books
Social entrepreneurship is growing and is at the top of the UK
government's agenda for improving the provision of welfare services
to individuals and communities. This book introduces students and
practitioners to the current policy context of UK social
entrepreneurship and the focus on those skills practitioners need
to initiate, to develop, and to run enterprises in this field. It
is first text to bring together the different insights of academics
and practitioners of social entrepreneurship. It shows how to
identify community need, to work in partnership with the intended
recipients of a service, to finance enterprises, and to manage
organizations through their various developmental stages. The book
provides readers with the ability to reflect on how these key
skills operate in the real world by the presentation of case
studies from the UK, the US, China, and India.
Collaborations between scientists often transcend borders and
cultural differences. The fundamental nature of science allows
scientists to communicate using knowledge of their field but the
institutions that support them are often hindered by financial and
cultural barriers. As a result, science suffers. This book evolved
from an August 2009 symposium at the 238th annual meeting of the
American Chemical Society in Washington, DC. Its focus is on
chemistry students and professors interested in developing a global
approach to teaching chemistry, by participating in an
international exchange program or incorporating culturally
inclusive techniques into their classroom. The book has three broad
themes; education research with a globalized perspective,
experiences of teaching and learning in different countries, and
organizations that support a global view of chemical education and
chemistry.
This volume responds to a growing interest in the language of legal
settings by situating the study of language and law within
contemporary theoretical debates in discourse studies, linguistic
anthropology, and sociolinguistics. The chapters in the collection
explore many of the common occasions when those acting on behalf of
the legal system, such as the police, lawyers and judges, interact
with those coming into contact with the legal system, such as
suspects and witnesses. However the chapters do this work through
the conceptual lens of 'textual travel', or the way that texts move
across space and time and are transformed along the way.
Collectively, notions of textual travel shed new light on the ways
in which texts can influence, and are influenced by, social and
legal life. With contributions from leading experts in language and
law, Legal-Lay Communication explores such 'textual travel' themes
as the mediating role of technologies in the investigatory stages
of the legal process, the centrality of intertextuality in the
legal construction of cases in court, the transformative effects of
recontextualization in processes of judicial decision-making, and
the way that processes of textual travel disturb the apparent
permanence of legal categorization. The book challenges both the
notion of legal text as a static repository of meaning and the very
idea of legal-lay or lay-legal communication.
Children born and raised on the religious fringe are a distinctive
yet largely unstudied social phenomenon -they are irreversibly
shaped by the experience having been thrust into a radical
religious culture by birth. The religious group is all
encompassing. It accounts for their family, their school, social
networks, and everything that prepares them for their adult life.
The inclusion of a second generation of participants raises new
concerns and legal issues. Perfect Children examines the ways new
religious movements adapt to a second generation, how children are
socialized, what happens to these children as they mature, and how
their childhoods have affected them. Amanda van Twist conducted
over 50 in-depth interviews with individuals born into new
religious groups, some of whom have stayed in the group, some of
whom have left. She also visited the groups, their schools and
homes, and analyzed support websites maintained by those who left
the religious groups that raised them. She also attended
conferences held by NGOs concerned with the welfare of children in
"cults." The main groups she studies include the Bruderhof,
Scientology, the Family International, the Unification Church, and
the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. Children born
into new religions often start life as "special children" believed
to be endowed with heightened spiritual capabilities. But as they
mature into society at large they acquire other labels. Those who
stay in the group are usually labeled as "goodies" and
"innovators". Those who leave tend to be labeled as "baddies" or
seen as "troubled." Whether they stay or leave, children raised on
the religious fringe experience a unique form of segregation in
adulthood. Van Twist analyzes group behavior on an
organizational/institutional level as well as individual behavior
within groups, and how these affect one another. Her study also
raises larger questions about religious freedom in the light of the
State's responsibility towards children, and children's rights
against the rights of parents to raise their children within their
religion.
This volume is about the many ways we perceive. In nineteen new
essays, philosophers and cognitive scientists explore the nature of
the individual senses, how and what they tell us about the world,
and how they interrelate. They consider how the senses extract
perceptual content from receptoral information and what kinds of
objects we perceive and whether multiple senses ever perceive a
single event. Questions pertaining to how many senses we have, what
makes one sense distinct from another, and whether and why
distinguishing senses may be useful feature prominently.
Contributors examine the extent to which the senses act in concert,
rather than as discrete modalities, and whether this influence is
epistemically pernicious, neutral, or beneficial. Many of the
essays engage with the idea that it is unduly restrictive to think
of perception as a collation of contents provided by individual
sense modalities. Rather, contributors contend that to understand
perception properly we need to build into our accounts the idea
that the senses work together. In doing so, they aim to develop
better paradigms for understanding the senses and thereby to move
toward a better understanding of perception.
The number of women elected to Latin American legislatures has
grown significantly over the past thirty years. This increase in
the number of women elected to national office is due, in large
part, to gender-friendly electoral rules such as gender quotas and
proportional electoral systems, and it has, in turn, fostered
constituent support for representative democracy. Still, this book
argues that women are gaining political voice and bringing women's
issues to state agendas, but they are not gaining political power.
Women are marginalized by the male majority in office and relegated
to the least powerful committees and leadership posts, hindering
progress toward real political equality.
In Political Power and Women's Representation in Latin America,
Leslie Schwindt-Bayer examines the causes and consequences of
women's representation in Latin America. She does so by asking a
series of politically relevant and theoretically challenging
questions, including why the numbers of women in office have
increased in some countries but vary across others; what the
presence of women in office means for the way representatives
legislate; and what consequences the election of women bears for
representative democracy more generally.
Schwindt-Bayer articulates a comprehensive theory of women's
representation that analyzes and connects trends in relation to
four facets of political representation: formal, descriptive,
substantive and symbolic. She then tests this theory empirically
using aggregate data from all eighteen Latin American democracies
and original fieldwork in Argentina, Colombia and Costa Rica.
Ultimately, this book communicates the complex and often incomplete
nature of women's political representation in Latin America.
"That summer afternoon, I had no way of knowing the book would radically alter my existence. Yet that proved to be the case."
So writes folklorist José Manuel de Prada-Samper about a chance discovery more than thirty years ago of an obscure book called Specimens of Bushman Folklore in a second-hand bookshop in England.
Part historical detective story, part memoir, Fading Footprints traces the author’s journey into the magical folklore of the /xam hunter-gatherers of the Upper Karoo. Through archival research and on field trips in South Africa, De Prada-Samper is able to humanise the /xam as he delves into the work and lives of researchers William Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, who recorded the stories of San prisoners in Cape Town in the late 1800.
The author learns that many are still told to this day by farm workers in forgotten corners of the Northern Cape and that, contrary to common belief, the culture and traditions of South Africa’s first people are still alive.
Routes and Realms explores the ways in which Muslims expressed
attachment to land from the ninth through the eleventh centuries,
the earliest period of intensive written production in Arabic. In
this groundbreaking first book, Zayde Antrim develops a "discourse
of place," a framework for approaching formal texts devoted to the
representation of territory across genres. The discourse of place
included such varied works as topographical histories, literary
anthologies, religious treatises, world geographies, poetry, travel
literature, and maps.
By closely reading and analyzing these works, Antrim argues that
their authors imagined plots of land primarily as homes, cities,
and regions and associated them with a range of claims to religious
and political authority. She contends that these are evidence of
the powerful ways in which the geographical imagination was tapped
to declare loyalty and invoke belonging in the early Islamic world,
reinforcing the importance of the earliest regional mapping
tradition in the Islamic world.
Routes and Realms challenges a widespread tendency to underestimate
the importance of territory and to over-emphasize the importance of
religion and family to notions of community and belonging among
Muslims and Arabs, both in the past and today.
In this volume, Qi Wang traces the developmental, social, cultural,
and historical origins of the autobiographical self - the self that
is made of memories of the personal past and of the family and the
community. Wang combines rigorous research, sensitive survey of
real memories and memory conversations, and fascinating personal
anecdotes into a state-of-the-art book. As a "marginal woman" who
grew up in the East and works and lives in the West, Wang's
analysis is unique, insightful, and approachable. Her accounts of
her own family stories, extraordinarily careful and thorough
documentation of research findings, and compelling theoretical
insights together convey an unequivocal message: The
autobiographical self is conditioned by one's time and culture.
Beginning with a perceptive examination of the form, content, and
function of parent-child conversations of personal and family
stories, Wang undertakes to show how the autobiographical self is
formed in and shaped by the process of family storytelling situated
in specific cultural contexts. By contrasting the development of
autobiographical writings in Western and Chinese literatures, Wang
seeks to demonstrate the cultural stance of the autobiographical
self in historical time. She examines the autobiographical self in
personal time, thoughtfully analyzing the form, structure, and
content of everyday memories to reveal the role of culture in
modulating information processing and determining how the
autobiographical self is remembered. Focusing on memories of early
childhood, Wang seeks to answer the question of when the
autobiographical self begins from a cross-cultural perspective. She
sets out further to explore some of the most controversial issues
in current psychological research of autobiographical memory,
focusing particularly on issues of memory representations versus
memory narratives and silence versus voice in the construction of
the autobiographical self appropriate to one's cultural
assumptions. She concludes with historical analyses of the
influences of the larger social, political, and economic forces on
the autobiographical self, and takes a forward look at the
autobiographical self as a product of modern technology.
The first book of its kind, Gender & Rock introduces readers to
how gender operates in multiple sites within rock culture,
including its music, lyrics, imagery, performances, instruments,
and business practices. Additionally, it explores how rock culture,
despite a history of regressive gender politics, has provided a
place for musicians and consumers to experiment with alternate
identities and ways of being. Drawing on feminist and queer
scholarship in popular music studies, musicology, cultural studies,
sociology, performance studies, literary analysis, and media
studies, Gender & Rock provides readers with a survey of the
topics, theories, and methods necessary for understanding and
conducting analyses of gender in rock culture. Via an
intersectional approach, the book examines how the gendering of
particular roles, practices, technologies, and institutions within
rock culture is related to discourses of race, sexuality, age, and
class.
The use of e-learning strategies in teaching is becoming
increasingly popular, particularly in higher education. Online
Learning and Assessment in Higher Education recognises the key
decisions that need to be made by lecturers in order to introduce
e-learning into their teaching. An overview of the tools for
e-learning is provided, including the use of Web 2.0 and the issues
surrounding the use of e-learning tools such as resources and
support and institutional policy. The second part of the book
focuses on e-assessment; design principles, different forms of
online assessment and the benefits and limitations of e-assessment.
Provides an accessible introduction to teaching with
technologyAddresses the basic aspects of decision-making for
successful introduction of e-learning, drawing on relevant
pedagogical principles from contemporary learning theoriesCrosses
boundaries between the fields of higher education and educational
technology (within the discipline of education), drawing on
discourse from both areas
Over the years, numerous tragic events serve as a reminder of the
extraordinary power of extremism, both on a religious and secular
level. As extremism confronts society on a daily basis, it is
essential to analyze, comprehend, and define it. It is also
essential to define extremism narrowly in order to avoid the danger
of recklessly castigating for mere thoughts alone. Tolerating
Intolerance provides readers with a focused definition of
extremism, and articulates the tensions faced in casting an
arbitrary, capricious net in an effort to protect society, while
offering mechanisms to resolve its seemingly intractable conundrum.
Professor Guiora examines extremism in six different countries:
Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom, and
the United States through interviews with a wide range of
individuals including academics, policy makers, faith leaders,
public commentators, national security and law enforcement
officials. This enables both an in-depth discussion of extremism in
each country, and facilitates a comparative analysis regarding both
religious and secular extremism.
In Spectacular Men, Sarah E. Chinn investigates how working class
white men looked to the early American theatre for examples of
ideal manhood. Theatre-going was the primary source of
entertainment for working people of the early Republic and the
Jacksonian period, and plays implicitly and explicitly addressed
the risks and rewards of citizenship. Ranging from representations
of the heroes of the American Revolution to images of doomed
Indians to plays about ancient Rome, Chinn unearths dozens of plays
rarely read by critics. Spectacular Men places the theatre at the
center of the self-creation of working white men, as voters, as
workers, and as Americans.
Since the Zuma presidency weakened crime intelligence, violent crime
surged, with murder rates rising over 75%. South Africa faces severe
femicide, and most murderers evade justice. Prisons fail by
perpetuating crime; harsher sentences do not help. Edwin Cameron, after
visiting prisons, advocates for reform. Along with colleagues, he
suggests abolishing minimum sentences, cash bail, and decriminalizing
drug use to improve safety and justice.
|
|