A volume in Research on Sociocultural Influences on Motivation and Learning Series Editor: Dennis M. McInerney, The Hong Kong Institute of Education It is now nearly thirty years since sociocultural theories of learning created great excitement and debate amongst those concerned with learning in diverse contexts. Since that time significant advances have been made in sociocultural theory and research. Various sociocultural approaches to the understanding of learning (for example, sociocultural psychology, sociocultural discourse, cultural historical activity theory) have been developed and consolidated and new challenges are currently being addressed. In the motivational arena sociocultural approaches deriving from Vygotsky have only begun to emerge relatively recently. In this Volume we examine and evaluate the achievements of past sociocultural theory and research, and consider the future directions of sociocultural theory and research in the domains of learning and motivation.

For over a century, California has been the world's most advanced agricultural zone, an agrarian juggernaut that not only outproduces every state in America, but also most countries. California's success, however, has come at significant costs. Never a family-farm region like the Midwest, California's landscape and Mediterranean climate have been manipulated and exploited to serve modern business interests. Home to gargantuan accomplishments such as the world's largest water storage and transfer network, California also relies on an army of Mexican farm laborers who live and work under dismal conditions. In The Conquest of Bread, acclaimed historian Richard A. Walker offers a wide-angle overview of the agro-industrial system of production in California from farm to table. He lays bare the long evolution of each link in the food chain, showing how a persistent emphasis on productivity and growth allowed California to outpace agriculture elsewhere in the United States. Full of thunder and surprises, The Conquest of Bread allows the reader to weigh the claims of both boosters and critics in the debate over the most extraordinary agricultural profusion in the modern world.

Catastrophic climate change overshadows the present and the future. Wrenching economic transformations have devastated workers and hollowed out communities. However, those fighting for jobs and those fighting for the planet have often been at odds. Does the world face two separate crises, environmental and economic? The promise of the Green New Deal is to tackle the threat of climate change through the empowerment of working people and the strengthening of democracy. In this view, the crisis of nature and the crisis of work must be addressed together-or they will not be addressed at all. This book brings together leading experts to explore the possibilities of the Green New Deal, emphasizing the future of work. Together, they examine transformations that are already underway and put forth bold new proposals that can provide jobs while reducing carbon consumption-building a world that is sustainable both economically and ecologically. Contributors also debate urgent questions: What is the value of a federal jobs program, or even a jobs guarantee? How do we alleviate the miseries and precarity of work? In key economic sectors, including energy, transportation, housing, agriculture, and care work, what kind of work is needed today? How does the New Deal provide guidance in addressing these questions, and how can a Green New Deal revive democracy? Above all, this book shows, the Green New Deal offers hope for a better tomorrow-but only if it accounts for work's past transformations and shapes its future.

Catastrophic climate change overshadows the present and the future. Wrenching economic transformations have devastated workers and hollowed out communities. However, those fighting for jobs and those fighting for the planet have often been at odds. Does the world face two separate crises, environmental and economic? The promise of the Green New Deal is to tackle the threat of climate change through the empowerment of working people and the strengthening of democracy. In this view, the crisis of nature and the crisis of work must be addressed together-or they will not be addressed at all. This book brings together leading experts to explore the possibilities of the Green New Deal, emphasizing the future of work. Together, they examine transformations that are already underway and put forth bold new proposals that can provide jobs while reducing carbon consumption-building a world that is sustainable both economically and ecologically. Contributors also debate urgent questions: What is the value of a federal jobs program, or even a jobs guarantee? How do we alleviate the miseries and precarity of work? In key economic sectors, including energy, transportation, housing, agriculture, and care work, what kind of work is needed today? How does the New Deal provide guidance in addressing these questions, and how can a Green New Deal revive democracy? Above all, this book shows, the Green New Deal offers hope for a better tomorrow-but only if it accounts for work's past transformations and shapes its future.

California is at a crossroads. For decades a global leader, inspiring the hopes and dreams of millions, the state has recently faced double-digit unemployment, multi-billion dollar budget deficits and the loss of trillions in home values. This atlas brings together the latest research and statistics in a graphic form that gives shape and meaning to these numbers. It shows a new California in the making, as it maps the economic, social, and political trends of a state struggling to maintain its leadership and to continue to offer its citizens the promise of prosperity. Among the world's largest economies, California is the nation's agricultural powerhouse, high tech crucible and leader in renewable energy. The state is the most populous and most diverse state in the continental U.S. Yet its infrastructure is coming under increasing pressure. Water supply systems are strained, the legendary highways are over capacity, and the celebrated system of public schooling is unable to offer affordable quality education at all levels. Health and welfare services, particularly for the poor, needy, disabled, and seniors, are at great risk. This indispensable resource gives readers the tools they need to understand the transformation as California attempts to forge a new identity in the midst of unprecedented challenges.

A volume in Research on Sociocultural Influences on Motivation and Learning Series Editor: Dennis M. McInerney, The Hong Kong Institute of Education It is now nearly thirty years since sociocultural theories of learning created great excitement and debate amongst those concerned with learning in diverse contexts. Since that time significant advances have been made in sociocultural theory and research. Various sociocultural approaches to the understanding of learning (for example, sociocultural psychology, sociocultural discourse, cultural historical activity theory) have been developed and consolidated and new challenges are currently being addressed. In the motivational arena sociocultural approaches deriving from Vygotsky have only begun to emerge relatively recently. In this Volume we examine and evaluate the achievements of past sociocultural theory and research, and consider the future directions of sociocultural theory and research in the domains of learning and motivation.

Winner of the Western History Association's 2009 Hal K. Rothman Award Finalist in the Western Writers of America Spur Award for the Western Nonfiction Contemporary category (2008). The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the world's most beautiful cities. Despite a population of 7 million people, it is more greensward than asphalt jungle, more open space than hardscape. A vast quilt of countryside is tucked into the folds of the metropolis, stitched from fields, farms and woodlands, mines, creeks, and wetlands. In The Country in the City, Richard Walker tells the story of how the jigsaw geography of this greenbelt has been set into place. The Bay Area's civic landscape has been fought over acre by acre, an arduous process requiring popular mobilization, political will, and hard work. Its most cherished environments--Mount Tamalpais, Napa Valley, San Francisco Bay, Point Reyes, Mount Diablo, the Pacific coast--have engendered some of the fiercest environmental battles in the country and have made the region a leader in green ideas and organizations. This book tells how the Bay Area got its green grove: from the stirrings of conservation in the time of John Muir to origins of the recreational parks and coastal preserves in the early twentieth century, from the fight to stop bay fill and control suburban growth after the Second World War to securing conservation easements and stopping toxic pollution in our times. Here, modern environmentalism first became a mass political movement in the 1960s, with the sudden blooming of the Sierra Club and Save the Bay, and it remains a global center of environmentalism to this day. Green values have been a pillar of Bay Area life and politics for more than a century. It is an environmentalism grounded in local places and personal concerns, close to the heart of the city. Yet this vision of what a city should be has always been informed by liberal, even utopian, ideas of nature, planning, government, and democracy. In the end, green is one of the primary colors in the flag of the Left Coast, where green enthusiasms, like open space, are built into the fabric of urban life. Written in a lively and accessible style, The Country in the City will be of interest to general readers and environmental activists. At the same time, it speaks to fundamental debates in environmental history, urban planning, and geography.

Case studies from cities on five continents demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The global discourse around urban ecology tends to homogenize and universalize, relying on such terms as "smart cities," "eco-cities," and "resilience," and proposing a "science of cities" based largely on information from the Global North. Grounding Urban Natures makes the case for the importance of place and time in understanding urban environments. Rather than imposing a unified framework on the ecology of cities, the contributors use a variety of approaches across a range of of locales and timespans to examine how urban natures are part of-and are shaped by-cities and urbanization. Grounding Urban Natures offers case studies from cities on five continents that demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The contributors consider the diversity of urban natures, analyzing urban ecologies that range from the coastal delta of New Orleans to real estate practices of the urban poor in Lagos. They examine the effect of popular movements on the meanings of urban nature in cities including San Francisco, Delhi, and Berlin. Finally, they explore abstract urban planning models and their global mobility, examining real-world applications in such cities as Cape Town, Baltimore, and the Chinese "eco-city" Yixing. Contributors Martin Avila, Amita Baviskar, Jia-Ching Chen, Henrik Ernstson, James Evans, Lisa M. Hoffman, Jens Lachmund, Joshua Lewis, Lindsay Sawyer, Sverker Soerlin, Anne Whiston Spirn, Lance van Sittert, Richard A. Walker