front cover of The Park Chung Hee Era
The Park Chung Hee Era
The Transformation of South Korea
Edited by Byung-Kook Kim and Ezra F. Vogel
Harvard University Press, 2013

In 1961 South Korea was mired in poverty. By 1979 it had a powerful industrial economy and a vibrant civil society in the making, which would lead to a democratic breakthrough eight years later. The transformation took place during the years of Park Chung Hee's presidency. Park seized power in a coup in 1961 and ruled as a virtual dictator until his assassination in October 1979. He is credited with modernizing South Korea, but at a huge political and social cost.

South Korea's political landscape under Park defies easy categorization. The state was predatory yet technocratic, reform-minded yet quick to crack down on dissidents in the name of political order. The nation was balanced uneasily between opposition forces calling for democratic reforms and the Park government's obsession with economic growth. The chaebol (a powerful conglomerate of multinationals based in South Korea) received massive government support to pioneer new growth industries, even as a nationwide campaign of economic shock therapy-interest hikes, devaluation, and wage cuts-met strong public resistance and caused considerable hardship.

This landmark volume examines South Korea's era of development as a study in the complex politics of modernization. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources in both English and Korean, these essays recover and contextualize many of the ambiguities in South Korea's trajectory from poverty to a sustainable high rate of economic growth.

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Politicking Online
The Transformation of Election Campaign Communications
Panagopoulos, Costas
Rutgers University Press, 2009
Of the many groundbreaking developments in the 2008 presidential election, the most important may well be the use of the Internet. In Politicking Online contributors explorethe impact of technology for electioneering purposes, from running campaigns andincreasing representation to ultimately strengthening democracy. The book reveals how social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook are used in campaigns along withe-mail, SMS text messaging, and mobile phones to help inform, target, mobilize, and communicate with voters.

While the Internet may have transformed the landscape of modern political campaigns throughout the world, Costas Panagopoulos reminds readers that officials and campaign workers need to adapt to changing circumstances, know the limits of their methods, and combine new technologies with more traditional techniques to achieve an overall balance.

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The Politics of Compassion and Transformation
And Transformation
Dick Simpson
Ohio University Press, 1989

In our time, we require a religion, ethics, and politics adequate to confront the global crises we face. In our scientific era of “progress,” we might expect to look with confidence to the “scientific” disciplines of political science, sociology, and economics to solve the problems of our civilization. We might also look to the older disciplines of religion and ethics to determine our values and to tell us what we ought to do. But the sad truth is that the dominant paradigms, methods, and conclusions of the social sciences and humanities are inadequate to this task. We need a new “politics of compassion and transformation.”

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Pope Francis and the Transformation of Health Care Ethics
Todd Salzman and Michael Lawler
Georgetown University Press, 2021

A call to reform Catholic health care ethics, inspired by the teachings of Pope Francis

Since its first edition in 1948, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (ERD) has guided Catholic institutions in the provision of health care that reflects both the healing ministry of Jesus and the Church’s understanding of human dignity. However, while the papacy of Pope Francis and the clerical sex-abuse scandal both profoundly impacted the Catholic Church, the latest edition of the ERD does not address or reflect these transformations.

Now for the first time, Todd A. Salzman and Michael G. Lawler present an extended critical commentary on the 2018 ERD. They argue that it is problematic in a number of ways. First, the revised ERD continues to prioritize a rule-based over a personalist-based ethical method, with an emphasis on absolute norms that proscribe specific medical acts. Further, it does not take into account Pope Francis’s transforming ecclesiological, methodological, and anthropological visions, neither internally in Catholic health care institutions nor externally in collaborations between Catholic and non-Catholic health care institutions. Finally, the revised ERD provides no evidence that the bishops grasp how the clerical sex-abuse scandal and its cover-up have fundamentally undermined episcopal authority and credibility.

Salzman and Lawler propose new ways forward for US Catholic health care ethics that prioritize human dignity as their guiding principle. As there is pluralism in Catholic definitions of human dignity, there must be pluralism in the norms and directives that facilitate realizing human dignity. Pope Francis’s emphasis on the virtues of mercy and care should move the ERD forward from a focus on absolute norms in medical ethics to a focus on virtues and principles to guide both patients and health care professionals in their discerned conscientious health care decisions.

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Population Circulation and the Transformation of Ancient Zuni Communities
Gregson Schachner
University of Arizona Press, 2012

Because nearly all aspects of culture depend on the movement of bodies, objects, and ideas, mobility has been a primary topic during the past forty years of archaeological research on small-scale societies. Most studies have concentrated either on local moves related to subsistence within geographically bounded communities or on migrations between regions resulting from pan-regional social and environmental changes. Gregson Schachner, however, contends that a critical aspect of mobility is the transfer of people, goods, and information within regions. This type of movement, which geographers term "population circulation," is vitally important in defining how both regional social systems and local communities are constituted, maintained, and—most important—changed.

Schachner analyzes a population shift in the Zuni region of west-central New Mexico during the thirteenth century AD that led to the inception of major demographic changes, the founding of numerous settlements in frontier zones, and the initiation of radical transformations of community organization. Schachner argues that intraregional population circulation played a vital role in shaping social transformation in the region and that many notable changes during this period arose directly out of peoples' attempts to create new social mechanisms for coping with frequent and geographically extensive residential mobility. By examining multiple aspects of population circulation and comparing areas that were newly settled in the thirteenth century to some that had been continuously occupied for hundreds of years, Schachner illustrates the role of population circulation in the formation of social groups and the creation of contexts conducive to social change.
 


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front cover of Prague English Studies and the Transformation of Philologies
Prague English Studies and the Transformation of Philologies
Edited by Martin Procházka and Ondrej Pilný
Karolinum Press, 2012
This collaborative monograph will commemorate the centenary of the Prague English Studies, officially inaugurated in 1912 by the appointment of Vilém Mathesius. Apart from reassessing the work of major representatives, such as Mathesius, Vladislav Vancura and others, and reviewing important developments in literature-oriented Prague English Studies with respect to Prague Structuralism. Prague English Studies and the Transformation of Philologies will focus on the methodological problems of the discipline related to the transformation of humanistic and modern philologies, searching for the links between two historically distinct interdisciplinary projects: humanist philology and structuralist semiology. 

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Prologue to the Chinese Revolution
The Transformation of Ideas and Institutions in Hunan Province, 1891–1907
Charlton M. Lewis
Harvard University Press, 1976

Hunan province has long interested students of modern China. A citadel of orthodoxy in the nineteenth century and a mainspring of revolution in the twentieth, it is an ideal focus for a study of the great transformation that occurred during the last two decades of the Ch'ing dynasty.

Hunan's experience illuminates key questions. How did foreign imperialism affect Chinese society? What ties bound the provinces to the central government, and how were these ties loosened to permit the secession movement of 1911? Why did nationalism emerge so abruptly and strongly after 1895? How did it differ from the antiforeignism that preceded it, and what did it contribute to the movement against the dynasty? As nationalism became strong, why did social revolution remain weak?

Since Hunanese leadership, moving from orthodoxy through revolution, constitutes one of the great continuities in China's modern history, the answers that a study of Hunan gives to these questions are relevant to larger patterns of change in China as a whole. Charlton Lewis has written a valuable handbook of national as well as provincial events during the turbulent period around the turn of the century.

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