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Books > Social sciences
It has been well-established that many of the injustices that
people around the world experience every day, from food insecurity
to unsafe labor conditions and natural disasters, are the result of
wide-scale structural problems of politics and economics. These are
not merely random personal problems or consequences of bad luck or
bad planning. Confronted by this fact, it is natural to ask what
should or can we do to mitigate everyday injustices? In one sense,
we answer this question when we buy the local homeless street
newspaper, decide where to buy our clothes, remember our reusable
bags when we shop, donate to disaster relief, or send letters to
corporations about labor rights. But given the global scale of
injustices related to poverty, environmental change, gender, and
labor, can these individual acts really impact the seemingly
intractable global social, political, and economic structures that
perpetuate and exacerbate them? Moreover, can we respond to
injustices in the world in ways that do more than just address
their consequences? In this book, Brooke A. Ackerly both answers
the question of what should we do, and shows that it's the wrong
question to ask. To ask the right question, we need to ground our
normative theory of global justice in the lived experience of
injustice. Using a feminist critical methodology, she argues that
what to do about injustice is not just an ethical or moral
question, but a political question about assuming responsibility
for injustice, regardless of our causal responsibility and extent
of our knowledge of the injustice. Furthermore, it is a matter that
needs to be guided by principles of human rights. As she argues,
while many understand human rights as political goals or
entitlements, they can also guide political strategy. Her aims are
twofold: to present a theory of what it means to take
responsibility for injustice and for ensuring human rights, as well
as to develop a guide for how to take responsibility in ways that
support local and global movements for transformative politics. In
order to illustrate her theory and guide for action, Ackerly draws
on fieldwork on the Rana Plaza collapse in 2013, the food crisis of
2008, and strategies from 125 activist organizations working on
women's and labor rights across 26 countries. Just Responsibility
integrates these ways of taking political responsibility into a
rich theory of political community, accountability, and leadership
in which taking responsibility for injustice itself transforms the
fabric of political life.
Rapid population growth, poor infrastructure, and inadequate housing
markets, all combined with haphazard urban planning, have created
unprecedented levels of poverty and inequality in Africa's metropolitan
areas.
In this context, the contributors to Poverty and Inequality in African
Cities investigate the challenges facing those who move away from rural
areas to the continent's cities in search of stable employment and a
better way of life―only to be confronted with overcrowding, poor
sanitation, unequal access to resources, and a lack of basic
necessities such as water and electricity. Without more effective urban
planning, they argue, a domino effect of worsening poverty and social
exclusion is inevitable.
This volume's precursor, Community Psychology: Analysis, context, and action, was published in 2007 and has been updated to reflect the many dramatic events and changes since then, including the impact of Covid-19, countless disasters related to climate change, and rapid technological advances-all events and changes that have impacted the dynamics and wellbeing of communities to varying degrees. There have also been significant changes in the field of community psychology itself-such as the field's increasing focus on decolonisation, climate justice, and digital spaces as spaces of community mobilisation. The current volume, Community Psychology: Global crises, local realities, and action, reflects these changes. This volume was developed with two key objectives in mind. The first, to provide readers with a comprehensive, diverse, and wide-ranging collection of insights, debates, and research on key theoretical, analytical, teaching, learning, and action-oriented approaches in community psychology. The second, to promote collaboration between community psychology students, researchers, activists, and others across geographical and national boundaries, given the reality and possibilities of increasing global interconnectedness
The first history of schooling gathered as a single and continuous text since the 1980s. It is also the first attempt to put together a history of South African schooling from the perspective of the subjugated people.
It attempts to show, as South Africa moves from a landscape essentially marked by encounters of people at different frontiers – physical, geographical, economic, cultural and psychological (where only the first two have previously received real attention) – how education is conceptualised, mobilised and used by all the players in the emerging country from the colonial Dutch and British periods into apartheid.
This book covers the period of the history of South African schooling from the establishment of the first school in 1658 to 1910 when South Africa became a Union. It approaches the task of narrating this history as a deliberate intervention. The intervention is that of restoring into the narrative the place of the subjugated people in the unfolding of a landscape which they share with a racialised white community. Propelled by a post-colonial framing of South Africa’s history, it offers itself as a deliberate counter to dominant historiographic and systematic privileging of the country’s elites. As such, it works on a larger canvas than simply the school. It deliberately works the story of schooling alongside the bigger socioeconomic history of South Africa, i.e., Dutch settlement of the Cape, the arrival of colonial Britain and the dramatic discovery of gold and diamonds leading to the industrialisation of South Africa. The story of schooling, the text seeks to emphasise, cannot be told independently of what is going on economically, politically and socially in the making of modern South Africa. Modernity, as a consequence, is a major theme of the book.
In telling the story of formal schooling in South Africa, the text, critically, seeks to retrieve the experience of the subjugated to present a wider and larger canvas upon which to describe the process of the making of the South African school. The text works historically with the Dutch East Indian experience up until 1804 when schooling was characterised by its neglect. It shows then how it develops a systematic character through the institutionalisation of a formal system in 1839 and the initiatives of missionaries. It draws the story to a close by looking at how formal systems are established in the colonies, the Boer Republics and the protectorates.
Thematically, the text seeks to thread through the conceits of race and class to show how, contradictorily, they take expression through conflict and struggle. In this conflict and struggle people who are not white (i.e., they do not yet have the racialised labels that apartheid brings in the middle of the 20th century) are systematically marginalised and discriminated against. They work with their discrimination, however, in generative ways by taking opportunity when it arises and exercising political agency.
The book is important because it explains the roots of educational inequality. It shows how inequality is systematically installed in almost every step of the way. For a period, in the middle of the 19th century, attempts were made to forestall this inequality. The text shows how the British administration acceded to eugenicist influences which pushed children of colour out of what were called first-class schools into segregated missionary-run institutions.
A wide-ranging rethinking of the many factors that comprise the
making of American Grand Strategy. What is grand strategy? What
does it aim to achieve? And what differentiates it from normal
strategic thought-what, in other words, makes it "grand"? In
answering these questions, most scholars have focused on diplomacy
and warfare, so much so that "grand strategy" has become almost an
equivalent of "military history." The traditional attention paid to
military affairs is understandable, but in today's world it leaves
out much else that could be considered political, and therefore
strategic. It is in fact possible to consider, and even reach, a
more capacious understanding of grand strategy, one that still
includes the battlefield and the negotiating table while expanding
beyond them. Just as contemporary world politics is driven by a
wide range of non-military issues, the most thorough considerations
of grand strategy must consider the bases of peace and
security-including gender, race, the environment, and a wide range
of cultural, social, political, and economic issues. Rethinking
American Grand Strategy assembles a roster of leading historians to
examine America's place in the world. Its innovative chapters
re-examine familiar figures, such as John Quincy Adams, George
Kennan, and Henry Kissinger, while also revealing the forgotten
episodes and hidden voices of American grand strategy. They expand
the scope of diplomatic and military history by placing the grand
strategies of public health, race, gender, humanitarianism, and the
law alongside military and diplomatic affairs to reveal hidden
strategists as well as strategies.
Contemporary scholarly and popular debate over the legacy of racial
integration in the United States rests between two positions that
are typically seen as irreconcilable. On one side are those who
argue that we must pursue racial integration because it is an
essential component of racial justice. On the other are those who
question the ideal of integration and suggest that its pursuit may
damage the very population it was originally intended to liberate.
In An Impossible Dream? Sharon A. Stanley shows that much of this
apparent disagreement stems from different understandings of the
very meaning of integration. In response, she offers a new model of
racial integration in the United States that takes seriously the
concerns of longstanding skeptics, including black power activists
and black nationalists. Stanley reformulates integration to
de-emphasize spatial mixing for its own sake and calls instead for
an internal, psychic transformation on the part of white Americans
and a radical redistribution of power. The goal of her vision is
not simply to mix black and white bodies in the same spaces and
institutions, but to dismantle white supremacy and create a genuine
multiracial democracy. At the same time, however, she argues that
achieving this model of integration in the contemporary United
States would be extraordinarily challenging, due to the poisonous
legacy of Jim Crow and the hidden, self-reinforcing nature of white
privilege today. Pursuing integration against a background of
persistent racial injustice might well exacerbate black suffering
without any guarantee of achieving racial justice or a worthwhile
form of integration. Given this challenge, pessimism toward
integration is a defensible position. But while the future of
integration remains uncertain, its pursuit can neither be
prescribed as a moral obligation nor rejected as intrinsically
indefensible. In An Impossible Dream? Stanley dissects this vexing
moral and political quandary.
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Catholic New Hampshire
(Paperback)
Barbara D Miles; Introduction by Monsignor Anthony R Frontiero
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The study of institutions, a core concept in comparative politics,
has produced many rich and influential theories on the economic and
political effects of institutions, yet it has been less successful
at theorizing their origins. In Fixing Democracy, Javier Corrales
develops a theory of institutional origins that concentrates on
constitutions and levels of power within them. He reviews numerous
Latin American constituent assemblies and constitutional amendments
to explore why some democracies expand rather than restrict
presidential powers and why this heightened presidentialism
discourages democracy. His signal theoretical contribution is his
elaboration on power asymmetries. Corrales determines that
conditions of reduced power asymmetry make constituent assemblies
more likely to curtail presidential powers, while weaker opposition
and heightened power asymmetry is an indicator that presidential
powers will expand. The bargain-based theory that he uses focuses
on power distribution and provides a more accurate variable in
predicting actual constitutional outcomes than other approaches
based on functionalism or ideology. While the empirical focus is
Latin America, Fixing Democracy contributes a broadly applicable
theory to the scholarship both institutions and democracy.
Ten Maps that tell you everything your need to know about global
politics - the million copy international bestseller
Geography shapes not only our history, but where we're headed...
ON THE RUSSIA/UKRAINE CRISIS - What is driving Russia's foreign policy?
Why do Putin's actions mirror those made in the past? Prisoners of
Geography analyses the geographic weaknesses and historical invasions
of Russia's territories, exploring how they have ultimately shaped the
decisions of its leaders past and present.
All leaders are constrained by geography. Their choices are limited by
mountains, rivers, seas and concrete. Yes, to follow world events you
need to understand people, ideas and movements - but if you don't know
geography, you'll never have the full picture.
If you've ever wondered why Putin is so obsessed with Crimea, why the
USA was destined to become a global superpower, or why China's power
base continues to expand ever outwards, the answers are all here.
In ten chapters and ten maps, Prisoners of Geography looks at the past,
present and future to offer an essential insight into one of the major
factors that determines world history.
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