![]() |
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
||
The Oregon State Insane Asylum was opened in Salem on October 23, 1883, and is one of the oldest continuously operated mental hospitals on the West Coast. In 1913, the name was changed to the Oregon State Hospital (OSH). The history of OSH parallels the development and growth in psychiatric knowledge throughout the United States. Oregon was active in the field of electroshock treatments, lobotomies, and eugenics. At one point, in 1959, there were more than 3,600 patients living on the campus. The Oscar-winning movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was filmed inside the hospital in 1972. In 2008, the entire campus was added to the National Register of Historic Places, and the state began a $360-million restoration project to bring the hospital to modern standards. The story of OSH is one of intrigue, scandal, recovery, and hope.
Americans have contradictory beliefs about how international trade affects the country as whole and specific communities. Yet notwithstanding the heat of political rhetoric, these beliefs are rarely mobilized into political action. Alexandra Guisinger examines this apparent disconnect by examining the bases of Americans' trade preferences in today's post-industrial economy and why do so few politicians attempt to take advantage of these preferences. The changing American economy has made the direct effects of trade less obvious, making the benefits and costs more difficult to determine. In addition, information sources, including the media, have changed in content and influence over time, their influence varies across different groups of individuals, and partly as a result individuals hold countervailing beliefs about the effect of trade on their own and others' economic outcomes. American Opinion on Trade provides a multi-method examination of the sources of attitudes, drawing on survey data and experimental surveys; it also traces how trade issues become intertwined with attitudes toward redistribution as well as gender and race.
In 2009, Chicago spent millions of dollars to create programs to prevent gang violence in some of its most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Yet in spite of the programs, violence has grown worse in some of the very neighborhoods that the violence prevention programs were intented to help. While public officials and social scientists often attribute the violence - and the failure of the programs - to a lack of community in poor neighborhoods, closer study reveals another source of community division: local politics. Through an ethnographic case study of Chicago's Little Village neighborhood, Wounded City dispells the popular belief that a lack of community is the primary source of violence, arguing that competition for political power and state resources often undermine efforts to reduce gang violence. Robert Vargas argues that the state, through the way it governs, can contribute to distrust and division among community members, thereby undermining social cohesion. The strategic actions taken by police officers, politicians, nonprofit organizations, and gangs to collaborate or compete for power and resources can vary block by block, triggering violence on some blocks while successfully preventing it on others. A rich blend of urban politics, sociology, and criminology, Wounded City offers a cautionary tale for elected officials, state agencies, and community based organizations involved with poor neighborhoods.
Many transnational campaigns, and particularly the transnational campaign on violence against women, promote international norms that target the behavior of local non-state actors, while many of these local actors are subscribing to conflicting local norms. What happens when the international and local norms collide? When does transnational activism lead individuals and communities to abandon local norms and embrace international ones? In When Norms Collide, Karisa Cloward presents a theoretical framework for understanding the range of local-level responses to international norm promotion, and applies this framework to the issues of female genital mutilation (FGM) and early marriage. Cloward argues that, conditional on exposure to an international normative message, individuals can decide to change their attitudes, their actual behavior, and the public image they present to international and local audiences. She finds that the impact of transnational activism on individual decision-making substantially depends on the salience of the international and local norms to their respective proponents, as well as on community-level factors such as the density of NGO activity and the availability of an exit option from the local norm. She further finds that there are both social and temporal dimensions to the diffusion of international norms across individuals and through communities. Cloward evaluates the theory by examining changes in the patterns of FGM and early marriage among the Maasai and Samburu in Kenya, using a mixed-method empirical strategy that includes qualitative interviews and an original representative survey with a randomized experimental component.
There are moments in American history when all eyes are focused on a federal court: when its bench speaks for millions of Americans, and when its decision changes the course of history. More often, the story of the federal judiciary is simply a tale of hard work: of finding order in the chaotic system of state and federal law, local custom, and contentious lawyering. The Federal Courts is a story of all of these courts and the judges and justices who served on them, of the case law they made, and of the acts of Congress and the administrative organs that shaped the courts. But, even more importantly, this is a story of the courts' development and their vital part in America's history. Peter Charles Hoffer, Williamjames Hull Hoffer, and N. E. H. Hull's retelling of that history is framed the three key features that shape the federal courts' narrative: the separation of powers; the federal system, in which both the national and state governments are sovereign; and the widest circle: the democratic-republican framework of American self-government. The federal judiciary is not elective and its principal judges serve during good behavior rather than at the pleasure of Congress, the President, or the electorate. But the independence that lifetime tenure theoretically confers did not and does not isolate the judiciary from political currents, partisan quarrels, and public opinion. Many vital political issues came to the federal courts, and the courts' decisions in turn shaped American politics. The federal courts, while the least democratic branch in theory, have proved in some ways and at various times to be the most democratic: open to ordinary people seeking redress, for example. Litigation in the federal courts reflects the changing aspirations and values of America's many peoples. The Federal Courts is an essential account of the branch that provides what Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Judge Oliver Wendell Homes Jr. called "a magic mirror, wherein we see reflected our own lives."
In the United States roughly 2 million people are incarcerated;
billions of animals are held captive (and then killed) in the food
industry every year; hundreds of thousands of animals are kept in
laboratories; thousands are in zoos and aquaria; millions of "pets"
are captive in our homes. Surprisingly, despite the rich ethical
questions it raises, very little philosophical attention has been
paid to questions raised by captivity.
Increasingly, guitar study is offered alongside band, orchestra, and chorus in school music programs. This development has drawn a new population of students into those programs but has left music educators scrambling to developing meaningful, sequential courses of study that both meet the needs of these new students and align with state, county, and national curricula. Few available guitar methods are designed with the classroom in mind, and fewer still take a holistic approach to teaching and learning the instrument. In short, teachers are left to navigate a vast array of method books that cover a variety of styles and approaches, often without the confidence and experience necessary to know 'what to teach when.' The Guitar Workbook: A Fresh Approach to Exploration and Mastery addresses the needs of these educators. Throughout the book's 20 lessons, students are encouraged to explore the ways various guitar styles and notation systems differ, as well as the ways they support and complement each other. Lessons cover myriad topics including pick-style playing, basic open position chords, finger-style technique, and power chords. Suggested 'Mastery Activities' at the end of each lesson support higher-order thinking, contextualize the skills and concepts studied, and provide a jumping off point for further exploration. Additionally, suggestions for further study point teachers and students to resources for extra practice.
1994 symbolised the triumphal defeat of almost three and a half centuries of racial separation since the Dutch East India Company planted a bitter almond hedge to keep indigenous people out of `their' Cape outpost in 1659. But for the majority of people in the world's most unequal society, the taste of bitter almonds linger as their exclusion from a dignified life remain the rule. In the year of South Africa's troubled coming-of-age, veteran investigative journalist Michael Schmidt brings to bear 21 years of his scribbled field notes to weave a tapestry of the view from below: here in the demi-monde of our transition from autocracy to democracy, in the half-light glow of the rusted rainbow, you will meet neo-Nazis and the newly dispossessed, Boers and Bushmen, black illegal coal miners and a bank robber, witches and wastrels, love children and land claimants. With their feet in the mud, the Born Free youth have their eyes on the stars.
Executive Functions in Children's Everyday Lives captures the diversity and complexity of the executive system that underlies children's everyday life experiences. Acquisition of executive functions, such as interpreting communication cues and the perspectives of others, is foundational to and a function of children's early social and communicative competencies. From the soccer field to the classroom, executive functions support children's strategic thinking and control of their environment. Knowing about executive functions and how this system of cognitive resources emerges in young children is important in understanding children's development. Recent research points to the importance of also considering environmental influences on the executive system. This book is unique in its focus on how experiences in children's early lives influence and are influenced by executive functions. Viewing executive functions through this broad lens is critical for professionals who intervene when children's access to executive functions is less than optimal. This book addresses a wide range of topics, including the neurological basis of executive functions in young children, the assessment of children's executive functions, theoretical and historical conceptions of executive functions, the relations between executive functions and theory of mind, multilingualism, early school transitions, and the relationship of executive functions to Autism and ADHD. This volume will be useful to professionals in applied psychology, undergraduate and graduate students, and social science and applied researchers.
Digital and social media are increasingly integrated into the dynamics of protest movements around the world. They strengthen the mobilization power of movements, extend movement networks, facilitate new modes of protest participation, and give rise to new protest formations. Meanwhile, conventional media remains an important arena where protesters and their targets contest for public support. This book examines the role of the media - understood as an integrated system comprised of both conventional media institutions and digital media platforms - in the formation and dynamics of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. For 79 days in 2014, Hong Kong became the focus of international attention due to a public demonstration for genuine democracy that would become known as the Umbrella Movement. During this time, twenty percent of the local population would join the demonstration, the most large-scale and sustained act of civil disobedience in Hong Kong's history - and the largest public protest campaign in China since the 1989 student movement in Beijing. On the surface, this movement was not unlike other large-scale protest movements that have occurred around the world in recent years. However, it was distinct in how bottom-up processes evolved into a centrally organized, programmatic movement with concrete policy demands. In this book, Francis L. F. Lee and Joseph M. Chan connect the case of the Umbrella Movement to recent theorizations of new social movement formations. Here, Lee and Chan analyze how traditional mass media institutions and digital media combined with on-the-ground networks in such a way as to propel citizen participation and the evolution of the movement as a whole. As such, they argue that the Umbrella Movement is important in the way it sheds light on the rise of digital-media-enabled social movements, the relationship between digital media platforms and legacy media institutions, the power and limitations of such occupation protests and new "action logics," and the continual significance of old protest logics of resource mobilization and collective action frames. Through a combination of protester surveys, population surveys, analyses of news contents and social media activities, this book reconstructs a rich and nuanced account of the Umbrella Movement, providing insight into numerous issues about the media-movement nexus in the digital era.
In the 1920s and 30s, musicians from Latin America and the Caribbean were flocking to New York, lured by the burgeoning recording studios and lucrative entertainment venues. In the late 1940s and 50s, the big-band mambo dance scene at the famed Palladium Ballroom was the stuff of legend, while modern-day music history was being made as the masters of Afro-Cuban and jazz idiom conspired to create Cubop, the first incarnation of Latin jazz. Then, in the 1960s, as the Latino population came to exceed a million strong, a new generation of New York Latinos, mostly Puerto Ricans born and raised in the city, went on to create the music that came to be called salsa, which continues to enjoy avid popularity around the world. And now, the children of the mambo and salsa generation are contributing to the making of hip hop and reviving ancestral Afro-Caribbean forms like Cuban rumba, Puerto Rican bomba, and Dominican palo. Salsa Rising provides the first full-length historical account of Latin Music in this city guided by close critical attention to issues of tradition and experimentation, authenticity and dilution, and the often clashing roles of cultural communities and the commercial recording industry in the shaping of musical practices and tastes. It is a history not only of the music, the changing styles and practices, the innovators, venues and songs, but also of the music as part of the larger social history, ranging from immigration and urban history, to the formation of communities, to issues of colonialism, race and class as they bear on and are revealed by the trajectory of the music. Author Juan Flores brings a wide range of people in the New York Latin music field into his work, including musicians, producers, arrangers, collectors, journalists, and lay and academic scholars, enriching Salsa Rising with a unique level of engagement with and interest in Latin American communities and musicians themselves.
For much of its history, human population growth increased at a glacial pace. The demographic rate only soared about 200 years ago, climaxing in the period 1950-2000. In that 50-year span, the population grew more than it had in the previous 5000 years. Though these raw numbers are impressive, they conceal the fact that the growth rate of population topped out in the 1960s. The apparent population boom may be approaching a population bust, despite our coexistence with more than seven billion people. In On the Cusp, economist Charles Pearson explores the meaning of this population trend from the arc of demographic growth to decline. He reviews Thomas Malthus's famous 1798 argument that human population would exceed the earth's carrying capacity, and explains why this surfaces periodically when birth rates strongly exceed 2.1 children per household. Analyzing population trends through dual lenses - demography and economics - Pearson examines the potential opportunities and challenges of population decline and aging. In many industrialized countries, the combination of an aging population and considerable food security may call for policies that boost fertility, immigration, and worker participation, reform pension schemes, and ease concern over moderating rates of population and economic growth. Sharp and occasionally funny, Pearson's research has thought-provoking implications for future public policies. Pearson ends his analysis with a mildly hopeful conclusion, noting that both the rich and the poor face a new demographic order. Bold and comprehensive, general readers and students alike will find On the Cusp an informative and engaging read.
Cities bring together masses of people, allow them to communicate and hide, and to transform private grievances into political causes, often erupting in urban protests that can destroy regimes. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has shaped urbanization via migration restrictions and redistributive policy since 1949 in ways that help account for the regime's endurance, China's surprising comparative lack of slums, and its curious moves away from urban bias over the past decade. Cities and Stability details the threats that cities pose for authoritarian regimes, regime responses to those threats, and how those responses can backfire by exacerbating the growth of slums and cities. Cross-national analyses of nondemocratic regime survival link larger cities to shorter regimes. To compensate for the threat urban threat, many regimes, including the CCP, favor cities in their policy-making. Cities and Stability shows this urban bias to be a Faustian Bargain, stabilizing large cities today but encouraging their growth and concentration over time. While attempting to industrialize, the Chinese regime created a household registration (hukou) system to restrict internal movement, separating urban and rural areas. China's hukou system served as a loophole, allowing urbanites to be favored but keeping farmers in the countryside. As these barriers eroded with economic reforms, the regime began to replace repression-based restrictions with economic incentives to avoid slums by improving economic opportunities in the interior and the countryside. Yet during the global Great Recession of 2008-09, the political value of the hukou system emerged as migrant workers, by the tens of millions, left coastal cities and dispersed across China's interior villages, counties, and cities. The government's stimulus policies, a combination of urban loans for immediate relief and long-term infrastructure aimed at the interior, reduced discontent to manageable levels and locales.
Ben Ross Schneider's volume, New Order and Progress takes a thorough look at the political economy of Brazil. The distinctive perspective of the 11 chapters is historical, comparative, and theoretical. Collectively, the chapters offer sobering insight into why Brazil has not been the rising economic star of the BRIC that many predicted it would be, but also documents the gains that Brazil has made toward greater equality and stability. The book is grouped into four parts covering Brazil's development strategy, governance, social change, and political representation. The authors -18 leading experts from Brazil and the United States - analyze core issues in Brazil's evolving political economy, including falling inequality, the new middle class, equalizing federalism, the politicization of the federal bureaucracy, resurgent state capitalism, labor market discrimination, survival of political dynasties, the expansion of suffrage, oil and the resource curse, exchange rates and capital controls, protest movements, and the frayed social contract.
From 1978 through the turn of the century, China was transformed from a state-owned economy into a predominantly private economy. This fundamental change took place under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is ideologically mandated and politically predisposed to suppress private ownership. In Dancing with the Devil, Yi-min Lin explains how and why such an ironic and puzzling reality came about. The central thesis is that private ownership became a necessary evil for the CCP because the public sector was increasingly unable to address two essential concerns for regime survival: employment and revenue. Focusing on political actors as a major group of change agents, the book examines how their self-interested behavior led to the decline of public ownership. Demographics and the state's fiscal system provide the analytical coordinates for revealing the changing incentives and constraints faced by political actors and for investigating their responses and strategies. These factors help explain CCP leaders' initial decision to allow limited private economic activities at the outset of reform. They also shed light on the subsequent growth of opportunism in the behavior of lower level officials, which undermined the vitality of public enterprises. Furthermore, they hold a key to understanding the timing of the massive privatization in the late 1990s, as well as its tempo and spread thereafter. Dancing with the Devil illustrates how the driving forces developed and played out in these intertwined episodes of the story. In so doing, it offers new insights into the mechanisms of China's economic transformation and enriches theories of institutional change.
Revolutionaries, counter-revolutionaries, and reformers the world over appeal to democracy to justify their actions. But when political factions compete over the right to act in "the people's" name, who is to decide? Although the problem is as old as the great revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, events from the Arab Spring to secession referendums suggest that today it is hardly any closer to being solved. This book defends a new theory of democratic legitimacy and change that provides an answer. Christopher Meckstroth shows why familiar views that identify democracy with timeless principles or institutions fall into paradox when asked to make sense of democratic founding and change. Solving the problem, he argues, requires shifting focus to the historical conditions under which citizens work out what it will mean to govern themselves in a democratic way. The only way of sorting out disputes without faith in progress is to show, in Socratic fashion, that some parties' claims to speak for "the people" cannot hold up even on their own terms. Meckstroth builds his argument on provocative and closely-argued interpretations of Plato, Kant, and Hegel, suggesting that familiar views of them as foundationalist metaphysicians misunderstand their debt to a method of radical doubt pioneered by Socrates. Recovering this tradition of antifoundational argument requires rethinking the place of German idealism in the history of political thought and opens new directions for contemporary democratic theory. The historical and Socratic theory of democracy the book defends makes possible an entirely new way of approaching struggles over contested notions of progress, popular sovereignty, political judgment and democratic change. |
You may like...
The Elements - A Visual Exploration of…
Nick Mann, Theodore Gray
Paperback
(1)R507 Discovery Miles 5 070
New Technology-Based Firms in the New…
Ray Oakey, Gary Cook, …
Hardcover
R3,090
Discovery Miles 30 900
Knowledge Management and Web 3.0 - Next…
Sandeep Kautish, Deepmala Singh, …
Hardcover
R4,228
Discovery Miles 42 280
Innovation in Southeast Asia
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
Paperback
R2,954
Discovery Miles 29 540
|