Despite the understanding of scholars that masculinity, far from being a natural or stable concept, is in reality a social construction, the culture at large continues to privilege an idealized, coherent male point of view. The Privilege of Crisis draws on the work of authors such as H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad—as well as contemporary postcolonial writers such as J. M. Coetzee, Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith—to show how recurrent references to a "crisis" of masculinity or the decline of masculinity serve largely to demonstrate and support positions of male privilege.
 

As urban areas have grown and sprawl has spread in recent decades, metropolitan governments around the world have begun to look beyond city borders, establishing regional partnerships to help them deal with issues of transit, resource use, and more. Metropolitan Governance examines this trend through a close comparative study of seven metropolitan areas in Israel and Germany. While not neglecting the reasons behind these changes in governance, the authors pay particular attention to their effects on—and diminishing of—democratic participation and accountability.

Historical work on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggests that as nation-states were solidifying throughout Western Europe, exiled groups tended to develop rival national identities—an occurrence that had been fairly uncommon in the two preceding centuries. Diaspora Identities draws on eight case studies, ranging from the early modern period through the twentieth century, to explore the interconnectedness of exile, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism as concepts, ideals, attitudes, and strategies among diasporic groups.

The course of human lives in Western society is inescapably shaped by political, cultural, and economic factors. Changes in these spheres inevitably lead to changes in our conceptions of everything from childhood and adulthood to family structures and living arrangements. The nineteen articles collected in The Life Course Reader offer a range of both theoretical and empirical studies of changing conceptions of the life course. Drawing on data from North America and Europe, the Reader will be indispensable for anyone studying human development and the twenty-first century family.

Policy Debates on Reprogenetics takes an in-depth look at recent public policy debates over stem cell research and therapeutic cloning in Great Britain and Germany in order to determine the effect of such debates on the progress of scientific knowledge. Svea Luise Herrmann argues that debates about government policy do not tend to lead to more societal and political control over scientific research; rather, the discussions, when framed as questions of ethics, allow societies to air anxieties without retarding or challenging scientific progress. As our understanding of genetics continues to grow, this volume will be a useful resource for scientists and policy makers alike.

Our conception of cultures and cultural change has altered dramatically in recent decades: no longer do we understand cultures as isolated units; rather, we see them as hybrid formations constantly engaged in a multidirectional process of exchange and influence with other cultures. Yet the very process by which we represent these cultural transfers is itself subject to cultural, political, and ideological conditions that affect our understanding, acknowledgment, and representation of them. Built around concrete examples of controversial representations of cultural transfer from Asia, the Arab world, and Europe, Cultural Transfers in Dispute presents a critical self-reflection on the scholarly practices that underpin our attempts to study and describe other cultures.