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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies
Americans have a deeply ambivalent relationship to guns. The United
States leads all nations in rates of private gun ownership, yet
stories of gun tragedies frequent the news, spurring calls for
tighter gun regulations. The debate tends to be acrimonious and is
frequently misinformed and illogical. The central question is the
extent to which federal or state governments should regulate gun
ownership and use in the interest of public safety. In this volume,
David DeGrazia and Lester Hunt examine this policy question
primarily from the standpoint of ethics: What would morally
defensible gun policy in the United States look like? Hunt's
contribution argues that the U.S. Constitution is right to frame
the right to possess a firearm as a fundamental human right. The
right to arms is in this way like the right to free speech. More
precisely, it is like the right to own and possess a cell phone or
an internet connection. A government that banned such weapons would
be violating the right of citizens to protect themselves. This is a
function that governments do not perform: warding off attacks is
not the same thing as punishing perpetrators after an attack has
happened. Self-protection is a function that citizens must carry
out themselves, either by taking passive steps (such as better
locks on one's doors) or active ones (such as acquiring a gun and
learning to use it safely and effectively). DeGrazia's contribution
features a discussion of the Supreme Court cases asserting a
constitutional right to bear arms, an analysis of moral rights, and
a critique of the strongest arguments for a moral right to private
gun ownership. He follows with both a consequentialist case and a
rights-based case for moderately extensive gun control, before
discussing gun politics and advancing policy suggestions. In
debating this important topic, the authors elevate the quality of
discussion from the levels that usually prevail in the public
arena. DeGrazia and Hunt work in the discipline of academic
philosophy, which prizes intellectual honesty, respect for opposing
views, command of relevant facts, and rigorous reasoning. They
bring the advantages of philosophical analysis to this
highly-charged issue in the service of illuminating the strongest
possible cases for and against (relatively extensive) gun
regulations and whatever common ground may exist between these
positions.
One of the most fascinating figures of seventeenth-century music,
composer and singer Antonia Padoani Bembo (c.1640 - c.1720) was
active in both Venice and Paris. Her work provides a unique
cross-cultural window into the rich musical cultures of these
cities, yet owing to her clandestine existence in France, for
almost three centuries Bembo's life was shrouded in mystery. In
this first-ever biography, Clare Fontijn unveils the enthralling
and surprising story of a remarkable woman who moved in the
musical, literary, and artistic circles of these European cultural
centers. Rebuffed in the attempt to divorce her abusive husband,
Bembo fled to Paris, leaving her children in Venice. Joining ranks
with composers glorifying Louis XIV, her song charmed the Sun King
and won over his court's sympathy to the cause of women. She
obtained his sponsorship to live in a semi-cloistered community in
Paris, where she wrote music for the spiritual and worldly needs of
the royal family. Offering fine examples of sacred and secular
vocal repertory for chamber settings and large ensembles, Bembo's
oeuvre reveals her preoccupation with female agency through dynamic
portrayals of such powerful figures as the Virgin Mary and the
Duchess of Burgundy. The genres in which she worked-love song,
opera, motet, cantata, trio sonata, and air-testify to the magic of
her voice and to her place alongside Strozzi, Jacquet de La Guerre,
and other major women composers of her time. Expertly engaging with
musicology, history, and gender studies, Claire Fontijn tells the
story of a brave and daring woman while providing a valuable key to
a long-hidden treasure trove of music. A groundbreaking biography,
Desperate Measures details the compelling life and music of a woman
with courage, determination, and talent who thrived within the
dictates of society and culture.
Migration is the most imprecise and difficult of all aspects of
pre-industrial population to measure. It was a major element in
economic and social change in early modern Britain, yet, despite a
wealth of detailed research in recent years, there has been no
systematic survey of its importance. This book reviews a wide range
of aspects of population migration, and their impacts on British
society, from Tudor times to the main phase of the Industrial
Revolution.
Race and Real Estate brings together new work by architects,
sociologists, legal scholars, and literary critics that qualifies
and complicates traditional narratives of race, property, and
citizenship in the United States. Rather than simply rehearsing the
standard account of how blacks were historically excluded from
homeownership, the authors of these essays explore how the raced
history of property affects understandings of home and citizenship.
While the narrative of race and real estate in America has usually
been relayed in terms of institutional subjugation, dispossession,
and forced segregation, the essays collected in this volume
acknowledge the validity of these histories while presenting new
perspectives on this story.
Norman Street is the first serious examination of a scenario that
appears likely to be played out again and again as federal budget
policies result in reduced services for urban areas across the
country. Based on a three-year study conducted in Brooklyn's
Greenpoint/Williamsburg section, the book is an in-depth, detailed
description of life in a multi-ethnic working class neighborhood
during New York City's fiscal crisis of 1975-78. Now updated with a
new introduction to address the changes and events of the thirty
years since the book's original publication, its lessons continue
to demonstrate the impact of political and economic changes on
everyday lives. Relating local events to national policy, Susser
deals directly with issues and problems that face industrial cities
nationwide: ethnic and race relations are analyzed within the
context of community organization and local politics; the impact of
landlord/tenant relations, housing discrimination, and red-lining
are examined; and the effects on the urban poor of gentrification
are documented. Since neighborhood issues are often of primary
concern to women, much of the book concerns the role of women as
community organizers and their integration of this role with
domestic responsibilities.
Beyond Yellow English is the first edited volume to examine issues
of language, identity, and culture among the rapidly growing Asian
Pacific American (APA) population. The distinguished
contributors-who represent a broad range of perspectives from
anthropology, sociolinguistics, English, and education-focus on the
analysis of spoken interaction and explore multiple facets of the
APA experience. Authors cover topics such as media representations
of APAs; codeswitching and language crossing; and narratives of
ethnic identity. The collection examines the experiences of Asian
Pacific Americans of different ethnicities, generations, ages, and
geographic locations across home, school, community, and
performance sites.
For the first time in legal history, an indictment was filed
against an acting head of state, Slobodan Milosevic, for crimes
that he allegedly committed while in office. Seeking to change the
concept of ethnic cleansing from a rationalizing euphemism to an
incriminating metaphor, the International Criminal Tribunal for the
Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) established precedents and expanded the
boundaries of international criminal and humanitarian law.
In Reclaiming Justice: The International Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia and Local Courts, Sanja Kutnjak Ivkovich and John Hagan
expand on prior literature about the ICTY by providing a
comprehensive view of how people from Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Croatia, Kosovo, and Serbia view and evaluate the ICTY. Kutnjak
Ivkovich and Hagan raise crucial questions about international
justice in a systematic and comprehensive manner, focusing on the
ICTY's legality and judicial independence, as well as specific
issues of substantive and procedural justice and collective and
individual responsibility. They provide an in-depth analysis of
perceptions about the ICTY and the subsequent work and decisions
reached by its local courts. In addition, they examine the
relationship between the views of the ICTY and ethnicity as the war
was fought largely along ethnic lines.
Just as Latin American countries began to transition to democracy
in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the region also saw gains in
social, cultural and economic gender equality. In accordance with
modernization theories, women in the region have also made
significant inroads into elected office. However, these gains vary
a great deal between countries in Latin America. They also vary
significantly at different levels of government even within the
same country. Inside government arenas, representation is highly
gendered with rules and norms that advantage men and disadvantage
women, limiting women's access to full political power. While one
might expect these variations to map onto socioeconomic and
cultural conditions within each country, they don't correlate. This
book makes, for the first time, a comprehensive comparison of
gender and representation across the region - in seven countries -
and at five different levels: the presidency, cabinets, national
legislatures, political parties, and subnational governments.
Overall, it argues that gender inequality in political
representation in Latin America is rooted in democratic
institutions and the democratic challenges and political crises
facing the region. Institutions and political context not only
influence the number of women and men elected to office, but also
what they do once in office, the degree of power to which they gain
access, and how their presence and actions influence democracy and
society, more broadly. Drawing on the expertise of scholars of
women, gender, and political institutions, this book is the most
comprehensive analysis of women's representation in Latin America
to date, and an important resource for research on women's
representation worldwide. The causes, consequences, and challenges
to women's representation in Latin America are not unique to that
region, and the book uses Latin American patterns to draw broad
conclusions about gendered representation in other areas of the
world.
A combined volume of three of the best-selling titles in the Reed
New Holland Aboriginal series: Aboriginal Legends - Animal Tales,
Aboriginal Fables and Legendary Tales, and Aboriginal Myths - Tales
of the Dreamtime. The emphasis throughout the book is on the
mystical bond that existed between Aborigines, their environment,
and the spirit life of the Dreamtime.
Social capital theorists have shown that inequality arises in part
because some people enjoy larger, more supportive or otherwise more
useful networks. But why do some people have better networks than
others? Unanticipated Gains argues that the answer lies less in
people's deliberate "networking" than in the institutional
conditions of the colleges, firms, gyms, and other organizations in
which they happen to participate routinely. The book introduces a
model of social inequality that takes seriously the embeddedness of
networks in formal organizations, proposing that what people gain
from their connections depends on where those connections are
formed and sustained. It studies an unlikely case: the experiences
of mothers whose children were enrolled in New York City childcare
centers. As a result of the routine practices and institutional
conditions of the centers-from the structure of their parents'
associations, to apparently innocuous rules such as pick-up and
drop-off times--many of these mothers dramatically increased their
social capital and measurably improved their wellbeing. Yet how
much they gained depended on how their centers were organized. The
daycare centers also brokered connections to other people and
organizations, affecting not only the size of mothers' networks but
also the resources available through them. Social inequality then
arises not merely out of differences in skills or deliberate
investments - as the conventional social scientific and political
wisdom would have it - but also out of the differences in the
routine organizations in which people belong. In addition to
childcare centers, Small also identifies the social forces at work
in many other organizations, including beauty salons, bath houses,
gyms, and churches.
A.W. Reed. Why are there black swans only in Australia? How did
snakes become poisonous? Learn about the powerful Rainbow Snake,
red and black flying foxes, the Eagle-hawk and the Medicine Man in
these incredible tales of the Dreamtime. A unique collection of
stories for those interested in learning more about this
fascinating culture.
The gentrification of Brooklyn has been one of the most striking
developments in recent urban history. Considered one of the city's
most notorious industrial slums in the 1940s and 1950s, Brownstone
Brooklyn by the 1980s had become a post-industrial landscape of hip
bars, yoga studios, and beautifully renovated, wildly expensive
townhouses. In The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn, Suleiman Osman
offers a groundbreaking history of this unexpected transformation.
Challenging the conventional wisdom that New York City's
renaissance started in the 1990s, Osman locates the origins of
gentrification in Brooklyn in the cultural upheavals of the 1960s
and 1970s. Gentrification began as a grassroots movement led by
young and idealistic white college graduates searching for
"authenticity" and life outside the burgeoning suburbs. Where
postwar city leaders championed slum clearance and modern
architecture, "brownstoners" (as they called themselves) fought for
a new romantic urban ideal that celebrated historic buildings,
industrial lofts and traditional ethnic neighborhoods as a refuge
from an increasingly technocratic society. Osman examines the
emergence of a "slow-growth" progressive coalition as brownstoners
joined with poorer residents to battle city planners and local
machine politicians. But as brownstoners migrated into poorer
areas, race and class tensions emerged, and by the 1980s, as
newspapers parodied yuppies and anti-gentrification activists
marched through increasingly expensive neighborhoods, brownstoners
debated whether their search for authenticity had been a success or
failure. The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn deftly mixes
architectural, cultural and political history in this eye-opening
perspective on the post-industrial city.
Since the emergence of Western philosophy and science among the
classical Greeks, debates have raged over the relative significance
of biology and culture on an individual's behavior. Today, recent
advances in genetics and biological science have pushed most
scholars past the tired nature vs. nurture debate to examine the
ways in which the natural and the social interact to influence
human behavior. In What's Normal?, Allan Horwitz brings a fresh
approach to this emerging perspective. Rather than try to solve
these issues universally, Horwitz demonstrates that both social and
biological mechanisms have varying degrees of influence in
different situations. Through case studies of human universals such
as incest aversion, fear, appetite, grief, and sex, Horwitz first
discusses the extreme instances where biology determines behavior,
where culture dominates, and where culture overrides basic
biological instincts. He then details the variety of ways in which
genes and environments interact; for instance, the primal drive to
eat and store calories when food supplies were scarce and
behavioral patterns in a society where food is abundant and obesity
stigmatized. Now that it's often easier to change our biology
rather than our culture, an understanding of which behaviors and
traits are simply normal or abnormal, and which are pathological or
necesitate treatment is more important than ever. Wide-ranging and
accessible, What's Normal? provides a crucial guide to the
biological and social bases of human behavior at the heart of these
matters.
Every weekday, the wildly popular Tom Joyner Morning Show reaches
more than eight million radio listeners. The show offers broadly
progressive political talk, adult-oriented soul music, humor,
advice, and celebrity gossip for largely older, largely
working-class black audience. But it's not just an old-school show:
it's an activist political forum and a key site reflecting on
popular aesthetics. It focuses on issues affecting African
Americans today, from the denigration of hard-working single
mothers, to employment discrimination and sexual abuse, to the
racism and violence endemic to the U.S. criminal justice system, to
international tragedies. In Black Radio/Black Resistance, author
Micaela di Leonardo dives deep into the Tom Joyner Morning Show's
25 year history inside larger U.S. broadcast history. From its rise
in the Clinton era and its responses to key events-9/11, Hurricane
Katrina, President Obama's elections and presidency, police murders
of unarmed black Americans and the rise of Black Lives Matter, and
Donald Trump's ascendancy-it has broadcast the varied, defiant, and
darkly comic voices of its anchors, guests, and audience members.
di Leonardo also investigates the new synergistic set of
cross-medium ties and political connections that have affected
print, broadcast, and online reporting and commentary in antiracist
directions. This new multiracial progressive public sphere has
extraordinary potential for shaping America's future. Thus Black
Radio/Black Resistance does far more than simply shed light on a
major counterpublic institution unjustly ignored for reasons of
color, class, generation, and medium. It demonstrates an
alternative understanding of the shifting black public sphere in
the digital age. Like the show itself, Black Radio/Black Resistance
is politically progressive, music-drenched, and blisteringly funny.
Informed by the author's work in dementia care and palliative care
as a psychodynamic psychotherapist, Holding Time contributes to an
increasing recognition of the importance and value of
relationship-centred care in this field. Most of the book is
written ethnographically and unfolds as a narrative. It also
includes the real words of staff and residents from the care homes
in which she conducted observations. Holding Time explores how the
relational investment in care is vital alongside a technical one.
The book does this by detailing the micro-interactions of everyday
care and concern and play before moving out on to a wider,
organisational and macro stage. It addresses our fears about
dependency on a societal level, and attempts to challenge the
foregrounding of the independent, rational individual over all
other experiences. The author's contribution is particular to the
UK dementia care home setting, and offers a predominantly
psychoanalytic take. It is a contemporary exploration of the
dementia care field, and contributes to the general movement to
improve care of those living (and working) with dementia.
Soon after 9/11, wild rumors began to spread: that Arab-Americans
were celebrating publicly, that some people had been warned, that
politicians knew all along.
The Global Grapevine reveals how--through our everyday thoughts and
conversations, and the rumors we spread--we grapple with the new
global world. Drawn from diverse sources, the book illuminates
urban legends like the claim that a certain t-shirt with a Chinese
pictogram brands the wearer as a prostitute, conspiracy theories
such as the "9/11 Truth Movement," or stories of tourists infected
with AIDS by locals. These rumors, the authors argue, reflect our
anxieties and fears about contact with foreign cultures--how we
believe foreign competition to be poisoning the domestic economy
and foreign immigration to be eroding American values. Focusing on
the threat posed by terrorism, the impact of immigration, the risks
involved in international trade, and the dangers faced by naive
tourism, the book provides a broad survey of the most widely
circulated rumors and examines what these tales reveal about
contemporary society.
Before he was a civil rights leader, the Rev. Martin Luther King,
Jr., was a man of the church. His father was a pastor, and much of
young Martin's time was spent in Baptist churches. He went on to
seminary and received a Ph.D. in theology. In 1953, he took over
leadership of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Atlanta. The church
was his home. But, as he began working for civil rights, King
became a fierce critic of the churches, both black and white. He
railed against white Christian leaders who urged him to be patient
in the struggle-or even opposed civil rights altogether. And, while
the black church was the platform from which King launched the
struggle for civil rights, he was deeply ambivalent toward the
church as an institution, and saw it as in constant need of reform.
In this book, Lewis Baldwin explores King's complex relationship
with the Christian church, from his days growing up at Ebenezer
Baptist, to his work as a pastor, to his battles with American
churches over civil rights, to his vision for the global church.
King, Baldwin argues, had a robust and multifaceted view of the
nature and purpose of the church that serves as a model for the
church in the 21st century.
Making it National argues that we need to rethink the way national
identity is constructed in Australia today. Graeme Turner takes a
series of recent instances - the mythologising of Bond and the
larrikin entrepreneurs, the Spycatcher trials, Maralinga and the
Bicentenary - showing how popular images of national identity are
used to serve specific rather than national interests.'Graeme
Turner's writing has a remarkable power to engage its readers with
all the immediacy, vividness and drama of our very best journalism,
while putting cultural theory to work in new and creative ways.' -
Meaghan Morris'Making it National could be to the 1990s what
Richard White's Inventing Australia was to the 1980s.' - Tony
Bennett, Institute for Cultural Policy Studies, Griffith University
As Senegal prepares to celebrate fifty years of independence from
French colonial rule, academic and policy circles are engaged in a
vigorous debate about its experience in nation building. An
important aspect of this debate is the impact of globalization on
Senegal, particularly the massive labor migration that began
directly after independence. From Tokyo to Melbourne, from Turin to
Buenos Aires, from to Paris to New York, 300,000 Senegalese
immigrants are simultaneously negotiating their integration into
their host society and seriously impacting the development of their
homeland.
This book addresses the modes of organization of transnational
societies in the globalized context, and specifically the role of
religion in the experience of migrant communities in Western
societies. Abundant literature is available on immigrants from
Latin America and Asia, but very little on Africans, especially
those from French speaking countries in the United States. Ousmane
Kane offers a case study of the growing Senegalese community in New
York City. By pulling together numerous aspects (religious, ethnic,
occupational, gender, generational, socio-economic, and political)
of the experience of the Senegalese migrant community into an
integrated analysis, linking discussion of both the homeland and
host community, this book breaks new ground in the debate about
postcolonial Senegal, Muslim globalization and diaspora studies in
the United States. A leading scholar of African Islam, Ousmane Kane
has also conducted extensive research in North America, Europe and
Africa, which allows him to provide an insightful historical
ethnography of the Senegalese transnational experience.
That men don't dance is a common stereotype. As one man tried to
explain, "Music is something that goes on inside my head, and is
sort of divorced from, to a large extent, the rest of my body." How
did this man's head become divorced from his body? While it may
seem natural and obvious that most white men don't dance, it is
actually a recent phenomenon tied to the changing norms of gender,
race, class, and sexuality. Combining archival sources, interviews,
and participant observation, Sorry I Don't Dance analyzes how,
within the United States, recreational dance became associated with
women rather than men, youths rather than adults, and ethnic
minorities rather than whites. At the beginning of the twentieth
century and World War II, lots of ordinary men danced. In fact,
during the first two decades of the twentieth century dance was so
enormously popular that journalists reported that young people had
gone "dance mad" and reformers campaigned against its moral
dangers. During World War II dance was an activity associated with
wholesome masculinity, and the USO organized dances and supplied
dance partners to servicemen. Later, men in the Swing Era danced,
but many of their sons and grandsons do not. Turning her attention
to these contemporary wallflowers, Maxine Craig talks to men about
how they learn to dance or avoid learning to dance within a culture
that celebrates masculinity as white and physically constrained and
associates both femininity and ethnically-marked men with
sensuality and physical expressivity. In this way, race and gender
get into bodies and become the visible, common sense proof of
racial and gender difference.
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