3027 books match the query 'Sociology' and 80 start with g

cover of GANGS IN THE GLOBAL CITY: Alternatives to Traditional Criminology

GANGS IN THE GLOBAL CITY

Alternatives to Traditional Criminology

Edited by John M. Hagedorn

University of Illinois Press, 2006

Although they were originally considered an American phenomenon, gangs today have grown and transformed into global enterprises. Despite these changes, criminologists have not yet reassessed worldwide gangs in terms of the other changes associated with globalization.

John M. Hagedorn aims to correct this oversight by incorporating important theoretical advances in urban political economy and understanding changes in gangs around the world as a result of globalization and the growth of the information economy. Contrary to older conceptions, today’s gangs are international, are often institutionalized, and may be explicitly concerned with race and ethnicity. Gangs in the Global City presents the work of an assortment of international scholars that challenges traditional approaches to problems in criminology from many different perspectives and includes theoretical discussions, case studies, and examinations of gang members’ identities. The contributors consider gangs not as fundamentally a crime problem but as variable social organizations in poor communities that are transitioning to the new economy.

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cover of Gabriel Tarde On Communication and Social Influence: Selected Papers

Gabriel Tarde On Communication and Social Influence

Selected Papers

Gabriel Tarde

University of Chicago Press, 1969

Gabriel Tarde ranks as one of the most outstanding sociologists of nineteenth-century France, though not as well known by English readers as his peers Comte and Durkheim. This book makes available Tarde’s most important work and demonstrates his continuing relevance to a new generation of students and thinkers.

Tarde’s landmark research and empirical analysis drew upon collective behavior, mass communications, and civic opinion as elements to be explained within the context of broader social patterns. Unlike the mass society theorists that followed in his wake, Tarde integrated his discussions of societal change at the macrosocietal and individual levels, anticipating later twentieth-century thinkers who fused the studies of mass communications and public opinion research.

Terry N. Clark’s introduction, considered the premier guide to Tarde’s opus, accompanies this important work, reprinted here for the first time in forty years.

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cover of Gabriel Tarde On Communication and Social Influence: Selected Papers

Gabriel Tarde On Communication and Social Influence

Selected Papers

Gabriel Tarde

University of Chicago Press, 1969

This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book. 

Gabriel Tarde ranks as one of the most outstanding sociologists of nineteenth-century France, though not as well known by English readers as his peers Comte and Durkheim. This book makes available Tarde’s most important work and demonstrates his continuing relevance to a new generation of students and thinkers.

Tarde’s landmark research and empirical analysis drew upon collective behavior, mass communications, and civic opinion as elements to be explained within the context of broader social patterns. Unlike the mass society theorists that followed in his wake, Tarde integrated his discussions of societal change at the macrosocietal and individual levels, anticipating later twentieth-century thinkers who fused the studies of mass communications and public opinion research.

Terry N. Clark’s introduction, considered the premier guide to Tarde’s opus, accompanies this important work, reprinted here for the first time in forty years.

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cover of Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal

Garbage Citizenship

Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal

Rosalind Fredericks

Duke University Press, 2018

Over the last twenty-five years, garbage infrastructure in Dakar, Senegal, has taken center stage in the struggles over government, the value of labor, and the dignity of the working poor. Through strikes and public dumping, Dakar's streets have been periodically inundated with household garbage as the city's trash collectors and ordinary residents protest urban austerity. Often drawing on discourses of Islamic piety, garbage activists have provided a powerful language to critique a neoliberal mode of governing-through-disposability and assert rights to fair labor. In Garbage Citizenship Rosalind Fredericks traces Dakar's volatile trash politics to recalibrate how we understand urban infrastructure by emphasizing its material, social, and affective elements. She shows how labor is a key component of infrastructural systems and how Dakar's residents use infrastructures as a vital tool for forging collective identities and mobilizing political action. Fleshing out the materiality of trash and degraded labor, Fredericks illuminates the myriad ways waste can be a potent tool of urban control and rebellion.
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cover of Garden Apartments: The History of a Low-Rent Utopia

Garden Apartments

The History of a Low-Rent Utopia

Joshua B. Freeman

University of Chicago Press, 2026

How a form of multifamily housing with idealistic roots became a ubiquitous model promoted by both public entities and private developers.
 
Eminent historian Joshua Freeman rescues garden apartments—typically low-rise multifamily residences that enclose or are surrounded by landscaped gardens—from their invisibility in the American landscape. He details their outsized influence on housing policy and social policy as they helped upgrade living standards for working people. Inspired by the architectural innovations and socialist politics of British garden cities, Red Vienna, and German modernist housing in the 1920s, these large, centrally managed projects were mostly not public housing, but their capitalist developers worked with governments to keep down rents. The results were often relatively small apartments and large communal spaces, aimed at fostering actual American community.
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cover of Gastrodiplomacy: Chinese Exclusion and the Ascent of Chinese Restaurants in New York City, 1870–1943

Gastrodiplomacy

Chinese Exclusion and the Ascent of Chinese Restaurants in New York City, 1870–1943

Heather Ruth Lee

University of Chicago Press, 2027

Traces how Chinese migrants challenged racialization and disenfranchisement by establishing Chinese restaurants during the Gilded Age. 

In Gastrodiplomacy, Heather Ruth Lee dives deep into not just the history of Chinese restaurants in early twentieth-century New York City but the delicate, inchoate, and constantly evolving dynamics among their owners, workers, and their predominantly white clientele. Lee argues that the stylistic and capitalist choices made by restaurateurs (“gastrodiplomats”) had outsized political effects on paternalistic white diners (“gastroliberals”) who patronized their establishments, particularly when it came to racial relations in cities that were growing and diversifying. Lee is not starry-eyed—satisfying white tongues and stomachs didn’t lead to an urban utopia of peace, harmony, and brotherhood—but she shows the great and subtle influences of Chinese migrants on American urban space, culture, and metropolitan identity in a defining time.

In Lee’s capable and compelling telling, the Chinese restaurant becomes a distinctive locus for the negotiation of political power, cultural influence, urban identity, and more. Gastrodiplomacy reveals much about burgeoning and increasingly cosmopolitan American cities, as well as about their dynamic relationships with the fluidities of the American character.

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cover of Gateway to Vacationland: The Making of Portland, Maine

Gateway to Vacationland

The Making of Portland, Maine

John F. Bauman

University of Massachusetts Press, 2012

Situated on a peninsula jutting into picturesque Casco Bay, Portland has long been admired for its geographical setting—the “beautiful city by the sea,” as native son Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called it. At the same time, Portland's deep, ice-free port has made it an ideal site for the development of coastal commerce and industry. Much of the city's history, John F. Bauman shows, has been defined by the effort to reconcile the competing interests generated by these attributes—to balance the imperatives of economic growth with a desire to preserve Portland's natural beauty.

Caught in the crossfire of British and French imperial ambitions throughout the colonial era, Portland emerged as a prosperous shipbuilding center and locus of trade in the decades following the American Revolution. During the nineteenth century it became a busy railroad hub and winter port for Canadian grain until a devastating fire in 1866 reduced much of the city to ruins. Civic leaders responded by reinventing Portland as a tourist destination, building new hotels, parks, and promenades, and proclaiming it the “Gateway to Vacationland.”

After losing its grain trade in the 1920s and suffering through the Great Depression, Portland withered in the years following World War II as it wrestled with the problems of deindustrialization, suburbanization, and an aging downtown. Efforts at urban renewal met with limited success until the 1980s, when a concerted plan of historic preservation and the restoration of the Old Port not only revived the tourist trade but eventually established Portland as one of America's “most livable cities.”

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cover of Gay Fatherhood: Narratives of Family and Citizenship in America

Gay Fatherhood

Narratives of Family and Citizenship in America

Ellen Lewin

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Men are often thought to have less interest in parenting than women, and gay men are generally assumed to prefer pleasure over responsibility. The toxic combination of these two stereotypical views has led to a lack of serious attention being paid to the experiences of gay fathers. But the truth is that more and more gay men are setting out to become parents and succeeding—and Gay Fatherhood aims to tell their stories.

Ellen Lewin takes as her focus people who undertake the difficult process of becoming fathers as gay men, rather than having become fathers while married to women. These men face unique challenges in their quest for fatherhood, negotiating specific bureaucratic and financial conditions as they pursue adoption or surrogacy and juggling questions about their future child’s race, age, sex, and health. Gay Fatherhood chronicles the lives of these men, exploring how they cope with political attacks from both the "family values" right and the "radical queer" left—while also shedding light on the evolving meanings of family in twenty-first-century America.

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cover of Gen Z, Explained: The Art of Living in a Digital Age

Gen Z, Explained

The Art of Living in a Digital Age

Roberta Katz, Sarah Ogilvie, Jane Shaw, and Linda Woodhead

University of Chicago Press, 2021

An optimistic and nuanced portrait of a generation that has much to teach us about how to live and collaborate in our digital world.

Born since the mid-1990s, members of Generation Z comprise the first generation never to know the world without the internet, and the most diverse generation yet. As Gen Z starts to emerge into adulthood and enter the workforce, what do we really know about them? And what can we learn from them? Gen Z, Explained is the authoritative portrait of this significant generation. It draws on extensive interviews that display this generation’s candor, surveys that explore their views and attitudes, and a vast database of their astonishingly inventive lexicon to build a comprehensive picture of their values, daily lives, and outlook. Gen Z emerges here as an extraordinarily thoughtful, promising, and perceptive generation that is sounding a warning to their elders about the world around them—a warning of a complexity and depth the “OK Boomer” phenomenon can only suggest.
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Much of the existing literature about Gen Z has been highly judgmental. In contrast, this book provides a deep and nuanced understanding of a generation facing a future of enormous challenges, from climate change to civil unrest. What’s more, they are facing this future head-on, relying on themselves and their peers to work collaboratively to solve these problems. As Gen Z, Explained shows, this group of young people is as compassionate and imaginative as any that has come before, and understanding the way they tackle problems may enable us to envision new kinds of solutions. This portrait of Gen Z is ultimately an optimistic one, suggesting they have something to teach all of us about how to live and thrive in this digital world.
 
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cover of Gender Flashpoints: The Power of Dialogue

Gender Flashpoints

The Power of Dialogue

Abigail C. Saguy

Russell Sage Foundation, 2026

Americans are deeply divided about gender. Like other issues in the U.S., debates about gender are extremely polarized and can spark intense anger and conflict. These “gender flashpoints” include gender identity, gender and parenting, gender-neutral restrooms, the use of identifying pronouns, and participation in women’s sports. Even the term gender itself has become contested. In this divisive social context, advocates on both sides have reduced complex issues to all-or-nothing propositions. Many people are confused about these topics, embarrassed about what they do not know, or afraid that they will be called a bigot if they say the “wrong thing.” In Gender Flashpoints, sociologist Abigail C. Saguy gets to the root of these major disagreements about gender.

Saguy interviews activists across the full political spectrum about a wide range of contemporary debates over gender to better understand points of contention as well as surprising areas of agreement. She finds that at the crux of many of these debates are disputes about the goals of gender-related advocacy, the strategies to achieve these goals, and whose rights are being advocated for. For example, when discussing pregnancy-related policy issues, there is disagreement as to whether the term “pregnant person” or “pregnant woman” should be used. While some believe “pregnant person” affirms the existence of nonbinary people and trans men, others believe it erases women. These differences often appear to be simply about language, but they are, in fact, disagreements on worldviews, identities, and legitimacy.

One of the conflicts Saguy dives into is the issue of gender-neutral restrooms. She finds when interviewing different activists about what they thought of the topic, they initially repeated the familiar, mainstream polarized discourse. LGBTQ+ activists and mainstream feminists emphasized the importance of restroom access, especially for transgender and gender-nonconforming people. Conservatives and gender-critical feminists emphasized women’s and girls’ vulnerability and need for privacy and safety in public restrooms. Across the political spectrum, activists spoke about how those on the “other side” were unwilling to engage in productive dialogue. However, Saguy also finds that activists on both sides recognized the complexity of the issue and agreed on the need for public bathrooms that provided everyone with greater safety and privacy. Activists across the spectrum showed enthusiasm for desegregated public restrooms that include an open space for sinks and mirrors—along with toilets with European style, fully enclosed floor-to-ceiling doors. Saguy advocates for engaging in dialogue about charged issues, such as gender-neutral bathrooms, in order to help identify workable solutions to seemingly intractable social problems. 

Gender Flashpoints is a fascinating and comprehensive view of the deeply personal and divisive topic of gender that offers hope for finding common ground and a path forward.

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cover of Gender Violence and the Press: The St. Kizito Story

Gender Violence and the Press

The St. Kizito Story

H. Leslie Steeves

Ohio University Press, 1997

On the night of Saturday, July 13, 1991, a mob of male students at the St. Kizito Mixed Secondary School in Meru, Kenya, attacked their female classmates in a dormitory. Nineteen schoolgirls were killed in the melee and more than 70 were raped or gang raped. The explanations in the press for the attack included a rebellion by male students over administrative mismanagement, academic stress, cultural norms for the Meru ethnic group, and victim characteristics (as assumed in rape myths). Rape had been tolerated at the school, according to press accounts. Dr. Steeves studied all stories published in three Nairobi daily newspapers and a weekly Kenyan newsmagazine for the year following the crime. She also examined a sampling of international reports. Her qualitative analysis sought to identify “framing patterns” supportive of patriarchal or of feminist ideologies of rape, and the ways in which those patterns have been affected by news values and traditions. Gender Violence and the Press shows how media discourse may allow space for feminist interests within the dominant patriarchal ideology. In this instance, the appearance of resistant views was significant in making alternative meanings available and in supporting women’s growing anti-violence activism.
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cover of Gender and Family Issues in the Workplace

Gender and Family Issues in the Workplace

Francine D. Blau

Russell Sage Foundation, 1997

Today, as married women commonly pursue careers outside the home, concerns about their ability to achieve equal footing with men without sacrificing the needs of their families trouble policymakers and economists alike. In 1993 federal legislation was passed that required most firms to provide unpaid maternity leave for up to twelve weeks. Yet, as Gender and Family Issues in the Workplace reveals, motherhood remains a primary obstacle to women's economic success. This volume offers fascinating and provocative new analyses of women's status in the labor market, as it explores the debate surrounding parental leave: Do policies that mandate extended leave protect jobs and promote child welfare, or do they sidetrack women's careers and make them less desirable employees? An examination of the disadvantages that women—particularly young mothers—face in today's workplace sets the stage for the debate. Claudia Goldin presents evidence that female college graduates are rarely able to balance motherhood with career track employment, and Jane Waldfogel demonstrates that having children results in substantially lower wages for women. The long hours demanded by managerial and other high powered professions further penalize women who in many cases still bear primary responsibility for their homes and children. Do parental leave policies improve the situation for women? Gender and Family Issues in the Workplace offers a variety of perspectives on this important question. Some propose that mandated leave improves women's wages by allowing them to preserve their job tenure. Other economists express concern that federal leave policies prevent firms and their workers from acting on their own particular needs and constraints, while others argue that because such policies improve the well-being of children they are necessary to society as a whole. Olivia Mitchell finds that although the availability of unpaid parental leave has sharply increased, only a tiny percentage of workers have access to paid leave or child care assistance. Others caution that the current design of family-friendly policies may promote gender inequality by reinforcing the traditional division of labor within families. Parental leave policy is a complex issue embedded in a tangle of economic and social institutions. Gender and Family Issues in the Workplace offers an innovative and up-to-date investigation into women's chances for success and equality in the modern economy.
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cover of Gender and International Migration

Gender and International Migration

KATHARINE M. DONATO is professor and chair of sociology at Vanderbilt University. DONNA GABACCIA is professor of history in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto-Scarborough.

Russell Sage Foundation, 2015

In 2006, the United Nations reported on the “feminization” of migration, noting that the number of female migrants had doubled over the last five decades. Likewise, global awareness of issues like human trafficking and the exploitation of immigrant domestic workers has increased attention to the gender makeup of migrants. But are women really more likely to migrate today than they were in earlier times? In Gender and International Migration, sociologist and demographer Katharine Donato and historian Donna Gabaccia evaluate the historical evidence to show that women have been a significant part of migration flows for centuries. The first scholarly analysis of gender and migration over the centuries, Gender and International Migration demonstrates that variation in the gender composition of migration reflect not only the movements of women relative to men, but larger shifts in immigration policies and gender relations in the changing global economy. While most research has focused on women migrants after 1960, Donato and Gabaccia begin their analysis with the fifteenth century, when European colonization and the transatlantic slave trade led to large-scale forced migration, including the transport of prisoners and indentured servants to the Americas and Australia from Africa and Europe. Contrary to the popular conception that most of these migrants were male, the authors show that a significant portion were women. The gender composition of migrants was driven by regional labor markets and local beliefs of the sending countries. For example, while coastal ports of western Africa traded mostly male slaves to Europeans, most slaves exiting east Africa for the Middle East were women due to this region’s demand for female reproductive labor. Donato and Gabaccia show how the changing immigration policies of receiving countries affect the gender composition of global migration. Nineteenth-century immigration restrictions based on race, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States, limited male labor migration. But as these policies were replaced by regulated migration based on categories such as employment and marriage, the balance of men and women became more equal – both in large immigrant-receiving nations such as the United States, Canada, and Israel, and in nations with small immigrant populations such as South Africa, the Philippines, and Argentina. The gender composition of today’s migrants reflects a much stronger demand for female labor than in the past. The authors conclude that gender imbalance in migration is most likely to occur when coercive systems of labor recruitment exist, whether in the slave trade of the early modern era or in recent guest-worker programs. Using methods and insights from history, gender studies, demography, and other social sciences, Gender and International Migration shows that feminization is better characterized as a gradual and ongoing shift toward gender balance in migrant populations worldwide. This groundbreaking demographic and historical analysis provides an important foundation for future migration research.
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cover of Gender and the Science of Difference: Cultural Politics of Contemporary Science and Medicine

Gender and the Science of Difference

Cultural Politics of Contemporary Science and Medicine

Fisher, Jill A

Rutgers University Press, 2011

How does contemporary science contribute to our understanding about what it means to be women or men? What are the social implications of scientific claims about differences between "male" and "female" brains, hormones, and genes? How does culture influence scientific and medical research and its findings about human sexuality, especially so-called normal and deviant desires and behaviors? Gender and the Science of Difference examines how contemporary science shapes and is shaped by gender ideals and images.

Prior scholarship has illustrated how past cultures of science were infused with patriarchal norms and values that influenced the kinds of research that was conducted and the interpretation of findings about differences between men and women. This interdisciplinary volume presents empirical inquiries into today's science, including examples of gendered scientific inquiry and medical interventions and research. It analyzes how scientific and medical knowledge produces gender norms through an emphasis on sex differences, and includes both U.S. and non-U.S. cases and examples.

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cover of Gender, Work and Property: An Ethnographic Study of Value in a Spanish Village

Gender, Work and Property

An Ethnographic Study of Value in a Spanish Village

Nancy Konvalinka

Campus Verlag, 2013

Why do young men born in many small villages in Spain tend, at the end of the twentieth century, to stay there to live, often remaining unmarried, while young women from the same villages tend to leave? In Gender, Work, and Property, Nancy Konvalinka explores this phenomenon using the case of one small village in northwestern Spain, and she extrapolates her findings there to understand similar processes elsewhere in Europe.
The changes in this village are analyzed and documented through long-term ethnographic research, participant observation, interviews, kinship diagrams, life-course models, and archive study in order to help bring the village alive for the reader.

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cover of Gendered Tradeoffs: Women, Family, and Workplace Inequality in Twenty-One Countries

Gendered Tradeoffs

Women, Family, and Workplace Inequality in Twenty-One Countries

Becky Pettit

Russell Sage Foundation, 2009

Gender inequality in the workplace persists, even in nations with some of the most progressive laws and generous family support policies. Yet the dimensions on which inequality is measured—levels of women's employment, number of hours worked, sex segregation by occupations and wages—tell very different stories across industrialized nations. By examining federally guaranteed parental leave, publicly provided child care, and part-time work, and looking across multiple dimensions of inequality, Becky Pettit and Jennifer Hook document the links between specific policies and aggregate outcomes. They disentangle the complex factors, from institutional policies to personal choices, that influence economic inequality. Gendered Tradeoffsdraws on data from twenty-one industrialized nations to compare women's and men's economic outcomes across nations, and over time, in search of a deeper understanding of the underpinnings of gender inequality in different labor markets. Pettit and Hook develop the idea that there are tradeoffs between different aspects of gender inequality in the economy and explain how those tradeoffs are shaped by individuals, markets, and states. They argue that each policy or condition should be considered along two axes—whether it promotes women's inclusion in or exclusion from the labor market and whether it promotes gender equality or inequality among women in the labor market. Some policies advance one objective while undercutting the other. The volume begins by reflecting on gender inequality in labor markets measured by different indicators. It goes on to develop the idea that there may be tradeoffs inherent among different aspects of inequality and in different policy solutions. These ideas are explored in four empirical chapters on employment, work hours, occupational sex segregation, and the gender wage gap. The penultimate chapter examines whether a similar framework is relevant for understanding inequality among women in the United States and Germany. The book concludes with a thorough discussion of the policies and conditions that underpin gender inequality in the workplace. The central thesis of Gendered Tradeoffs is that gender inequality in the workplace is generated and reinforced by national policies and conditions. The contours of inequality across and within countries are shaped by specific aspects of social policy that either relieve or concentrate the demands of care giving within households—usually in the hands of women—and at the same time shape workplace expectations. Pettit and Hook make a strong case that equality for women in the workplace depends not on whether women are included in the labor market but on how they are included.
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cover of Generations and Collective Memory

Generations and Collective Memory

Amy Corning and Howard Schuman

University of Chicago Press, 2015

When discussing large social trends or experiences, we tend to group people into generations. But what does it mean to be part of a generation, and what gives that group meaning and coherence? It's collective memory, say Amy Corning and Howard Schuman, and in Generations and Collective Memory, they draw on an impressive range of research to show how generations share memories of formative experiences, and how understanding the way those memories form and change can help us understand society and history.

Their key finding—built on historical research and interviews in the United States and seven other countries (including China, Japan, Germany, Lithuania, Russia, Israel, and Ukraine)—is that our most powerful generational memories are of shared experiences in adolescence and early adulthood, like the 1963 Kennedy assassination for those born in the 1950s or the fall of the Berlin Wall for young people in 1989. But there are exceptions to that rule, and they're significant: Corning and Schuman find that epochal events in a country, like revolutions, override the expected effects of age, affecting citizens of all ages with a similar power and lasting intensity.

The picture Corning and Schuman paint of collective memory and its formation is fascinating on its face, but it also offers intriguing new ways to think about the rise and fall of historical reputations and attitudes toward political issues.
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cover of Generations of Exclusion: Mexican-Americans, Assimilation, and Race

Generations of Exclusion

Mexican-Americans, Assimilation, and Race

Edward E. Telles

Russell Sage Foundation, 2008

Foreword by Joan W. Moore When boxes of original files from a 1965 survey of Mexican Americans were discovered behind a dusty bookshelf at UCLA, sociologists Edward Telles and Vilma Ortiz recognized a unique opportunity to examine how the Mexican American experience has evolved over the past four decades.  Telles and Ortiz located and re-interviewed most of the original respondents and many of their children.  Then, they combined the findings of both studies to construct a thirty-five year analysis of Mexican American integration into American society.  Generations of Exclusion is the result of this extraordinary project. Generations of Exclusion measures Mexican American integration across a wide number of dimensions: education, English and Spanish language use, socioeconomic status, intermarriage, residential segregation, ethnic identity, and political participation. The study contains some encouraging findings, but many more that are troubling. Linguistically, Mexican Americans assimilate into mainstream America quite well—by the second generation, nearly all Mexican Americans achieve English proficiency. In many domains, however, the Mexican American story doesn't fit with traditional models of assimilation. The majority of fourth generation Mexican Americans continue to live in Hispanic neighborhoods, marry other Hispanics, and think of themselves as Mexican. And while Mexican Americans make financial strides from the first to the second generation, economic progress halts at the second generation, and poverty rates remain high for later generations. Similarly, educational attainment peaks among second generation children of immigrants, but declines for the third and fourth generations. Telles and Ortiz identify institutional barriers as a major source of Mexican American disadvantage. Chronic under-funding in school systems predominately serving Mexican Americans severely restrains progress. Persistent discrimination, punitive immigration policies, and reliance on cheap Mexican labor in the southwestern states all make integration more difficult. The authors call for providing Mexican American children with the educational opportunities that European immigrants in previous generations enjoyed. The Mexican American trajectory is distinct—but so is the extent to which this group has been excluded from the American mainstream. Most immigration literature today focuses either on the immediate impact of immigration or what is happening to the children of newcomers to this country. Generations of Exclusion shows what has happened to Mexican Americans over four decades. In opening this window onto the past and linking it to recent outcomes, Telles and Ortiz provide a troubling glimpse of what other new immigrant groups may experience in the future.
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cover of Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History

Genetics and the Unsettled Past

The Collision of DNA, Race, and History

Wailoo, Keith

Rutgers University Press, 2012

Our genetic markers have come to be regarded as portals to the past. Analysis of these markers is increasingly used to tell the story of human migration; to investigate and judge issues of social membership and kinship; to rewrite history and collective memory; to right past wrongs and to arbitrate legal claims and human rights controversies; and to open new thinking about health and well-being. At the same time, in many societies genetic evidence is being called upon to perform a kind of racially charged cultural work: to repair the racial past and to transform scholarly and popular opinion about the “nature” of identity in the present.

Genetics and the Unsettled Past considers the alignment of genetic science with commercial genealogy, with legal and forensic developments, and with pharmaceutical innovation to examine how these trends lend renewed authority to biological understandings of race and history.

This unique collection brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines—biology, history, cultural studies, law, medicine, anthropology, ethnic studies, sociology—to explore the emerging and often contested connections among race, DNA, and history. Written for a general audience, the book’s essays touch upon a variety of topics, including the rise and implications of DNA in genealogy, law, and other fields; the cultural and political uses and misuses of genetic information; the way in which DNA testing is reshaping understandings of group identity for French Canadians, Native Americans, South Africans, and many others within and across cultural and national boundaries; and the sweeping implications of genetics for society today.

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cover of Genocide: Truth, Memory, and Representation

Genocide

Truth, Memory, and Representation

Alexander Laban Hinton and Kevin Lewis O Neill, eds.

Duke University Press, 2009

What happens to people and the societies in which they live after genocide? How are the devastating events remembered on the individual and collective levels, and how do these memories intersect and diverge as the rulers of postgenocidal states attempt to produce a monolithic “truth” about the past? In this important volume, leading anthropologists consider such questions about the relationship of genocide, truth, memory, and representation in the Balkans, East Timor, Germany, Guatemala, Indonesia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sudan, and other locales.

Specialists on the societies about which they write, these anthropologists draw on ethnographic research to provide on-the-ground analyses of communities in the wake of mass brutality. They investigate how mass violence is described or remembered, and how those representations are altered by the attempts of others, from NGOs to governments, to assert “the truth” about outbreaks of violence. One contributor questions the neutrality of an international group monitoring violence in Sudan and the assumption that such groups are, at worst, benign. Another examines the consequences of how events, victims, and perpetrators are portrayed by the Rwandan government during the annual commemoration of that country’s genocide in 1994. Still another explores the silence around the deaths of between eighty and one hundred thousand people on Bali during Indonesia’s state-sponsored anticommunist violence of 1965–1966, a genocidal period that until recently was rarely referenced in tourist guidebooks, anthropological studies on Bali, or even among the Balinese themselves. Other contributors consider issues of political identity and legitimacy, coping, the media, and “ethnic cleansing.” Genocide: Truth, Memory, and Representation reveals the major contribution that cultural anthropologists can make to the study of genocide.

Contributors. Pamela Ballinger, Jennie E. Burnet, Conerly Casey, Elizabeth Drexler, Leslie Dwyer, Alexander Laban Hinton, Sharon E. Hutchinson, Uli Linke, Kevin Lewis O’Neill, Antonius C. G. M. Robben, Debra Rodman, Victoria Sanford

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cover of Gentlemen's Disagreement: Alfred Kinsey, Lewis Terman, and the Sexual Politics of Smart Men

Gentlemen's Disagreement

Alfred Kinsey, Lewis Terman, and the Sexual Politics of Smart Men

Peter Hegarty

University of Chicago Press, 2013

What is the relationship between intelligence and sex? In recent decades, studies of the controversial histories of both intelligence testing and of human sexuality in the United States have been increasingly common—and hotly debated. But rarely have the intersections of these histories been examined. In Gentlemen’s Disagreement, Peter Hegarty enters this historical debate by recalling the debate between Lewis Terman—the intellect who championed the testing of intelligence— and pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and shows how intelligence and sexuality have interacted in American psychology.

Through a fluent discussion of intellectually gifted onanists, unhappily married men, queer geniuses, lonely frontiersmen, religious ascetics, and the two scholars themselves, Hegarty traces the origins of Terman’s complaints about Kinsey’s work to show how the intelligence testing movement was much more concerned with sexuality than we might remember. And, drawing on Foucault, Hegarty reconciles these legendary figures by showing how intelligence and sexuality in early American psychology and sexology were intertwined then and remain so to this day.

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cover of Gentrification Down the Shore

Gentrification Down the Shore

Molly Vollman Makris

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Makris and Gatta engage in a rich ethnographic investigation of Asbury Park to better understand the connection between jobs and seasonal gentrification and the experiences of longtime residents in this beach-community city. They demonstrate how the racial inequality in the founding of Asbury Park is reverberating a century later. This book tells an important and nuanced tale of gentrification using an intersectional lens to examine the history of race relations, the too often overlooked history of the postindustrial city, the role of the LGBTQ population, barriers to employment and access to amenities, and the role of developers as the city rapidly changes. Makris and Gatta draw on in-depth interviews, focus groups, ethnographic observation, as well as data analysis to tell the reader a story of life on the West Side of Asbury Park as the East Side prospers and to point to a potential path forward.
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cover of Geography And Social Movement: Comparing Antinuclear Activism in the Boston Area

Geography And Social Movement

Comparing Antinuclear Activism in the Boston Area

Byron A. Miller

University of Minnesota Press, 2000

A comparative analysis of the implications of space, place, and scale in political mobilization.

A comparative analysis of the implications of space, place, and scale in political mobilization.

Context matters, as students of social movements increasingly agree, and yet very little attention has been paid to the role geography plays in activism. Geography and Social Movements corrects this oversight, bringing a geographical perspective to the study of social movements. Byron A. Miller directly addresses the implications of space, place, and scale in social movement mobilization, and then demonstrates their significance in a detailed comparative analysis of peace movements in three municipalities around Boston. In focusing on the Boston area-an old northeastern region, heavily industrialized with many companies working on military contracts, and also a center of education-Miller is able to explore how campaigns aimed at curbing nuclear arms operate within the cultural, political, social, and economic confines of particular places and spaces. He shows how the decisions and actions of local peace movement organizations played a central role in the movement’s successes and failures, and how local organizations had to respond to the differing class, race, and gender characteristics of different locales. Miller’s empirical analysis clearly demonstrates that geographic strategies for social movement organizations have direct consequences for the successes and failures of specific campaigns.
[more]
cover of Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms

Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms

Georg Simmel

University of Chicago Press, 1972

"Of those who created the intellectual capital used to launch the enterprise of professional sociology, Georg Simmel was perhaps the most original and fecund. In search of a subject matter for sociology that would distinguish it from all other social sciences and humanistic disciplines, he charted a new field for discovery and proceeded to explore a world of novel topics in works that have guided and anticipated the thinking of generations of sociologists. Such distinctive concepts of contemporary sociology as social distance, marginality, urbanism as a way of life, role-playing, social behavior as exchange, conflict as an integrating process, dyadic encounter, circular interaction, reference groups as perspectives, and sociological ambivalence embody ideas which Simmel adumbrated more than six decades ago."—Donald N. Levine

Half of the material included in this edition of Simmel's writings represents new translations. This includes Simmel's important, lengthy, and previously untranslated "Group Expansion and Development of Individuality," as well as three selections from his most neglected work, Philosophy of Money; in addition, the introduction to Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie, chapter one of the Lebensanschauung, and three essays are translated for the first time.
[more]
cover of Georg Simmel: Essays on Art and Aesthetics

Georg Simmel

Essays on Art and Aesthetics

Georg Simmel

University of Chicago Press, 2020

Georg Simmel is one of the most original German thinkers of the twentieth century and is considered a founding architect of the modern discipline of sociology. Ranging over fundamental questions of the relationship of self and society, his influential writings on money, modernity, and the metropolis continue to provoke debate today.
Fascinated by the relationship between culture, society, and economic life, Simmel took an interest in myriad phenomena of aesthetics and the arts.  A friend of writers and artists such as Auguste Rodin, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Stefan George, he wrote dozens of pieces engaging with topics such as the work of Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Rodin, Japanese art, naturalism and symbolism, Goethe, “art for art’s sake”, art exhibitions, and the aesthetics of the picture frame.

This is the first collection to bring together Simmel’s finest writing on art and aesthetics, and many of the items appear in English in this volume for the first time. The more than forty essays show the protean breadth of Simmel’s reflections, covering landscape painting, portraiture, sculpture, poetry, theater, form, style, and representation. An extensive introduction by Austin Harrington gives an overview of Simmel’s themes and elucidates the significance of his work for the many theorists who would be inspired by his ideas.

Something of an outsider to the formal academic world of his day, Simmel wrote creatively with the flair of an essayist. This expansive collection of translations preserves the narrative ease of Simmel’s prose and will be a vital source for readers with an interest in Simmel’s trailblazing ideas in modern European philosophy, sociology, and cultural theory.
[more]
cover of George Herbert Mead on Social Psychology

George Herbert Mead on Social Psychology

George Herbert Mead

University of Chicago Press, 1964

One of the most brilliantly original of American pragmatists, George Herbert Mead published surprisingly few major papers and not a single book during his lifetime. Yet his influence on American sociology and social psychology since World War II has been exceedingly strong.

This volume is a revised and enlarged edition of the book formerly published under the title The Social Psychology of George Herbert Mead. It contains selections from Mead's posthumous books: Mind, Self, and Society; Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century; The Philosophy of the Act; and The Philosophy of the Present, together with an incisive, newly revised, introductory essay by Anselm Strauss on the importance of Mead for contemporary social psychology.

"Required reading for the social scientist."—Milton L. Barron, Nation
[more]
cover of George Herbert Mead on Social Psychology

George Herbert Mead on Social Psychology

George Herbert Mead

University of Chicago Press, 1964

This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book. 

One of the most brilliantly original of American pragmatists, George Herbert Mead published surprisingly few major papers and not a single book during his lifetime. Yet his influence on American sociology and social psychology since World War II has been exceedingly strong.

This volume is a revised and enlarged edition of the book formerly published under the title The Social Psychology of George Herbert Mead. It contains selections from Mead's posthumous books: Mind, Self, and Society; Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century; The Philosophy of the Act; and The Philosophy of the Present, together with an incisive, newly revised, introductory essay by Anselm Strauss on the importance of Mead for contemporary social psychology.

"Required reading for the social scientist."—Milton L. Barron, Nation
[more]
cover of George Herbert Mead: THE MAKING OF A SOCIAL PRAGMATIST

George Herbert Mead

THE MAKING OF A SOCIAL PRAGMATIST

Gary A. Cook

University of Illinois Press, 1993

This groundbreaking study details the intellectual development of George Herbert Mead as a thinker of great originality and as a practitioner of social reform. Gary Cook traces the genesis of Mead's social psychological and philosophical ideas by analyzing his journal articles and posthumously published writings.
 
[more]
cover of German Dis/Continuities, Volume 96

German Dis/Continuities, Volume 96

Martin Morris

Duke University Press, 0

The twentieth-century history of few countries has been so profoundly marked by breaks, discontinuities, and ruptures as has Germany’s—the radical breaks between the Wilhelmine empire, the Weimar Republic, and the National Socialist period; the “end of history” in 1945 and the dual reconstruction from “Year Zero,” followed by the reunification of post-1989 German. This special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly focuses on the many dimensions of these discontinuities—social, political, cultural, aesthetic, psychological, and physical—as well as the continuities that are equally, if less apparently, implied by them.
The contributions presented here include Fredric Jameson’s “Ramblings in Old Berlin,” Günter Grass’s “Lonesome Capitalism,” and Peter Weiss’s “Aesthetics of Resistance.” Among the topics discussed in the volume are the debate over Holocaust memorials in Germany and the significance of their connections to the German past, the problematic continuity that identifies the new unified Germany with the former Federal Republic; the dangers to women posed by the neoliberal project; the legacy of the avant-garde in today’s media theory; Ars nova and Doktor Faustus; nostalgia for the old German Democratic Republic; and reflections on traumatic memory and history as trauma.

Contributors. Ulrich Baer, Michael Geyer, Günter Grass, Frigga Haug, Julia Hell, Fredric Jameson, Juliet Koss, Andreas Michel, Martin Morris, Arkady Plotnitsky, Pierra Vidal-Naquet, Peter Weiss, James E. Young

[more]
cover of German Ideology: From France to Germany and Back

German Ideology

From France to Germany and Back

Louis Dumont

University of Chicago Press, 1995

In this comparative anthropological analysis, Louis Dumont illuminates German and French ideology, European culture, and cultural interaction. His analysis of texts by Troeltsch, Thomas Mann, Goethe, and others, against the background of previously gathered evidence and of French common notions, specify the differences—otherwise frequently but vaguely alluded to—between French and German cultures.

Anyone interested in the fate of national ideology and the concept of the individual will benefit from this radical reinterpretation of modern values and the place of modernity in history.

"What François Furet did for French history, Dumont did for anthropology, turning it away from engaged politics and towards the sober study of the modern age." —Mark Lilla, London Review of Books

"There are many fine things in Dumont's study. Beyond any doubt, his cultural anthropology of the modern spirit highlights some of the key energies of the of the last two centuries. . . . [An] impressive . . . detailed analysis." —Martin Swales, Times Higher Education Supplement

"[An] unsettling, rich, demanding, profound study." —Publishers Weekly
[more]
cover of Get Out of My Room!: A History of Teen Bedrooms in America

Get Out of My Room!

A History of Teen Bedrooms in America

Jason Reid

University of Chicago Press, 2016

Teenage life is tough. You’re at the mercy of parents, teachers, and siblings, all of whom insist on continuing to treat you like a kid and refuse to leave you alone. So what do you do when it all gets to be too much? You retreat to your room (and maybe slam the door).

Even in our era of Snapchat and hoverboards, bedrooms remain a key part of teenage life, one of the only areas where a teen can exert control and find some privacy. And while these separate bedrooms only became commonplace after World War II, the idea of the teen bedroom has been around for a long time. With Get Out of My Room!, Jason Reid digs into the deep historical roots of the teen bedroom and its surprising cultural power. He starts in the first half of the nineteenth century, when urban-dwelling middle-class families began to consider offering teens their own spaces in the home, and he traces that concept through subsequent decades, as social, economic, cultural, and demographic changes caused it to become more widespread. Along the way, Reid shows us how the teen bedroom, with its stuffed animals, movie posters, AM radios, and other trappings of youthful identity, reflected the growing involvement of young people in American popular culture, and also how teens and parents, in the shadow of ongoing social changes, continually negotiated the boundaries of this intensely personal space.

Richly detailed and full of surprising stories and insights, Get Out of My Room! is sure to offer insight and entertainment to anyone with wistful memories of their teenage years. (But little brothers should definitely keep out.)
[more]
cover of Getting Paid While Taking Time: The Women's Movement and the Development of Paid Family Leave Policies in the United States

Getting Paid While Taking Time

The Women's Movement and the Development of Paid Family Leave Policies in the United States

Megan Sholar

Temple University Press, 2016

The United States remains the only industrialized nation in the world that does not provide paid family leave at the national level for either men or women. In the more than two decades since the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act, there have been numerous unsuccessful attempts to expand family leave benefits nationally. However, in the United States, it is common for innovations in family policies to arise at the state level.

In her timely book, Getting Paid While Taking Time, Megan Sholar explains the development of family leave policies at both the national and state levels in the United States. She provides cogent studies of states that have passed and proposed family leave legislation, and she pays special attention to the ways in which women’s movement actors and other activists (e.g., labor unions) exert pressure on public officials to help influence the policymaking process. In her conclusion, Sholar considers the future of paid family leave policies in the United States and the chances for it ever equaling the benefits in other countries. 

[more]
cover of Getting Your Way: Strategic Dilemmas in the Real World

Getting Your Way

Strategic Dilemmas in the Real World

James M. Jasper

University of Chicago Press, 2006

Getting other people to do what we want is a useful skill for anyone. Whether you’re seeking a job, negotiating a deal, or angling for that big promotion, you’re engaged in strategic thought and action. In such moments, you imagine what might be going on in another person’s head and how they’ll react to what you do or say. At the same time, you also try to pick the best way to realize your goals, both with and without the other person’s cooperation. Getting Your Way teaches us how to win that game by offering a fuller understanding of how strategy works in the real world.

As we all know, rules of strategy are regularly discovered and discussed in popular books for business executives, military leaders, and politicians. Those works with their trendy lists of pithy maxims and highly effective habits can help people avoid mistakes or even think anew about how to tackle their problems. But they are merely suggestive, as each situation we encounter in the real world is always more complex than anticipated, more challenging than we had hoped. James M. Jasper here shows us how to anticipate those problems before they actually occur—by recognizing the dilemmas all strategic players must negotiate, with each option accompanied by a long list of costs and risks. Considering everyday dilemmas in a broad range of familiar settings, from business and politics to love and war, Jasper explains how to envision your goals, how to make the first move, how to deal with threats, and how to employ strategies with greater confidence.

Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Rosa Parks, Hugo Chávez, and David Koresh all come into play in this smart and engaging book, one that helps us recognize and prepare for the many dilemmas inherent in any strategic action.

[more]
cover of Getting around Brown: Desegregation, Development, and the Columbus Public Schools

Getting around Brown

Desegregation, Development, and the Columbus Public Schools

Gregory S. Jacobs

The Ohio State University Press, 1998

Getting Around Brown is both the first history of school desegregation in Columbus, Ohio, and the first case study to explore the interplay of desegregation, business, and urban development in America.

Drawing on a broad range of sources, including over sixty interviews, the book details the causes and consequences of Penick v. Columbus Board of Education (1977). Gregory S. Jacobs argues that school desegregation in Columbus failed to produce equal educational opportunity, not because it was inherently detrimental to learning, but because it was incompatible with urban development. As a consequence, the long-term health of the city school district was sacrificed to preserve the growth of the city itself. The resulting middle-class abandonment of urban education in Columbus produced an increasingly poor, African-American city school system and a powerful form of defensive activism within the overwhelmingly white suburban systems.

The title of the book refers not only to the elaborate tools used to circumvent the spirit of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision but also to the need to move beyond the flawed dichotomies and failed policies that have come to define desegregation. The book calls for a reconsideration of the complicated relationship race, class, and housing patterns have with city school reform efforts, a relationship obscured by this country’s vitriolic and occasionally violent battle over busing. Jacobs concludes his study with a “modest proposal,” in which he recommends the abolition of the Columbus Public School District, the dispersal of its students throughout surrounding suburban systems, and the creation of a choice-based “experimental education zone” within the old city school district boundaries.

Readable and relevant, Getting around Brownis essential reading for scholars of recent American history, urban studies, civil rights and race relations, and educational policy, as well as anyone interested in public education and politics.

[more]
cover of Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

Ghostly Matters

Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

Avery F. Gordon

University of Minnesota Press, 1996

[more]
cover of Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

Ghostly Matters

Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

Avery F. Gordon

University of Minnesota Press, 2008

“Avery Gordon’s stunningly original and provocatively imaginative book explores the connections linking horror, history, and haunting. ” —George Lipsitz

“The text is of great value to anyone working on issues pertaining to the fantastic and the uncanny.”  —American Studies International

“Ghostly Matters immediately establishes Avery Gordon as a leader among her generation of social and cultural theorists in all fields. The sheer beauty of her language enhances an intellectual brilliance so daunting that some readers will mark the day they first read this book. One must go back many more years than most of us can remember to find a more important book.” —Charles Lemert

Drawing on a range of sources, including the fiction of Toni Morrison and Luisa Valenzuela (He Who Searches), Avery Gordon demonstrates that past or haunting social forces control present life in different and more complicated ways than most social analysts presume. Written with a power to match its subject, Ghostly Matters has advanced the way we look at the complex intersections of race, gender, and class as they traverse our lives in sharp relief and shadowy manifestations.

Avery F. Gordon is professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Janice Radway is professor of literature at Duke University.

[more]
cover of Ghosts of Organizations Past: Communities of Organizations as Settings for Change

Ghosts of Organizations Past

Communities of Organizations as Settings for Change

Dan Ryan

Temple University Press, 2015

In Ghosts of Organizations Past, Dan Ryan asks, “Why are urban communities such hard places to implement community improvement programs?” Looking at New Haven, Connecticut, and a now-defunct program called Fighting Back, which was created to build community coalitions against the abuse of alcohol and other drugs, Ryan shows how the normal properties of organizations generate apparent pathologies. He shows how the “ghosts,” or artifacts, of past organizations, both inhibited and enhanced Fighting Back's chances of success.

Ryan draws on concepts from the study of organizations, social capital, and social networks to re-think questions such as “What kind of thing is a community?” and “Why is it so difficult to build community initiatives out of organizations?” He provides a social organizational explanation for problems familiar to anyone who has been involved in community programs, issues that are usually understood as personal incompetence, turf wars, greed, or corruption.

Ghosts of Organizations Past describes the challenges of using organizations to create change in places in dire need of it.
[more]
cover of Girls in Trouble with the Law

Girls in Trouble with the Law

Schaffner, Laurie

Rutgers University Press, 2006

In Girls in Trouble with the Law, sociologist Laurie Schaffner takes us inside juvenile detention centers and explores the worlds of the young women incarcerated within. Across the nation, girls of color are disproportionately represented in detention facilities, and many report having experienced physical harm and sexual assaults. For girls, the meaning of these and other factors such as the violence they experience remain undertheorized and below the radar of mainstream sociolegal scholarship. When gender is considered as an analytic category, Schaffner shows how gender is often seen through an outmoded lens.

Offering a critical assessment of what she describes as a gender-insensitive juvenile legal system, Schaffner makes a compelling argument that current policies do not go far enough to empower disadvantaged girls so that communities can assist them in overcoming the social limitations and gender, sexual, and racial/ethnic discrimination that continue to plague young women growing up in contemporary United States.
[more]
cover of Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution

Give a Man a Fish

Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution

James Ferguson

Duke University Press, 2015

In Give a Man a Fish James Ferguson examines the rise of social welfare programs in southern Africa, in which states make cash payments to their low income citizens. More than thirty percent of South Africa's population receive such payments, even as pundits elsewhere proclaim the neoliberal death of the welfare state. These programs' successes at reducing poverty under conditions of mass unemployment, Ferguson argues, provide an opportunity for rethinking contemporary capitalism and for developing new forms of political mobilization. Interested in an emerging "politics of distribution," Ferguson shows how new demands for direct income payments (including so-called "basic income") require us to reexamine the relation between production and distribution, and to ask new questions about markets, livelihoods, labor, and the future of progressive politics.
[more]
cover of Global Cities of the South, Volume 22

Global Cities of the South, Volume 22

Ashley Dawson and Brent Hayes Edwards, eds.

Duke University Press, 0

For the first time in history, over 50 percent of human beings live in cities. Perhaps more surprising is that cities in the developed world have been eclipsed in size and growth by the megacities of the underdeveloped world—the “global South.” As primary sites for human consumption of natural resources and for pollution of the environment, these global cities will witness the twenty-first-century crises—ecological, political, and social—when they first become full-blown. Global Cities of the South examines these portending disasters unfolding in the megacities of the global South.

This special issue challenges postcolonial theorists to engage with urban studies and challenges urban analysts to turn their focus to the postcolonial societies where these cities have developed. Gathering well-known scholars in postcolonial theory and urban studies, the collection opens an interdisciplinary exchange through a series of case studies focused on cities in Africa and Asia. One essay argues that the world’s urban spaces are key to the continuance of inequity under capitalist globalization (exemplified by rapidly expanding urban slums), as well as to any possible resistance to that inequity. Another article considers the history and politics of Harlem from the perspective of a well-known academic, activist, and postcolonial theorist whose work here is interwoven with the photographic art of Alice Attie. A third reflects on the politics of representation of Hindu and Muslim populations in Mumbai, evaluating popular media including film and the cosmopolitan fiction of Salman Rushdie.

Contributors. Alice Attie, Mike Davis, Ashley Dawson, Brent Hayes Edwards, Brian Larkin, Rossana Reguillo, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Rashmi Varma, Victor Vich

[more]
cover of Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age

Global Cities

Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age

Petro, Patrice

Rutgers University Press, 2003

In Global Cities, scholars from an impressive array of disciplines critique the growing body of literature on the process broadly known as "globalization." This interdisciplinary focus enables the authors to explore the complex geographies of modern cities, and offer possible strategies for reclaiming a sense of place and community in these globalized urban settings. While examining major cities including New York, Tokyo, Berlin, Paris, and Hong Kong, contributors insist that the study of urban experiences must remain as attentive to the material effects as to the psychic and social consequences of globalization. Accordingly, essays explore the implications of global culture for architecture, cinema, and communication--but do so in a way that highlights the importance of the spaces between such metropolitan centers. These locations, the authors argue, serve as increasingly important "frontier zones," where a diverse set of actors converge and contend for power and presence. Such a perspective ultimately adds nuance and meaning to our understanding of the heterogeneous urban landscapes of these global cities. Linda Krause is an associate professor in the Department of Architecture at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Patrice Petro is professor of film studies and director of the Center for International Education at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. A volume in the New Directions in International Studies series, edited by Patrice Petro
[more]
cover of Global Decisions, Local Collisions: Urban Life In The New World Order

Global Decisions, Local Collisions

Urban Life In The New World Order

David Ranney

Temple University Press, 2002

The politics of the past must be rethought. They were designed for a world where the U.S. manufactured at home, and where portions of U.S.-based labor had traded social stability for high wages. In this thought-provoking work, David Ranney shows how our world has changed and offers a plan for remaking progressive politics to meet the crises brought about by what George H. W. Bush first termed "the new world order. "Drawing from his experiences in Chicago politics, first as a factory worker and later as an activist and academic, Ranney shows how the increasing mobility of capital, the easy availability of credit, and a changing government policies have reshaped the urban world where U.S. workers live their everyday lives. This is not the story of the interconnectedness of modern business, but rather the need for self-respecting people who bring home a weekly paycheck to see the common, global problems they face, and to work together to bring about meaningful change.Showing how globalization has led to specific local consequences for cities and the workers that inhabit them, David Ranney presents a means for taking stock of the effects of globalization; a look at these changes in labor markets; economic development politics; housing policy; and employment policies; and an organizing strategy for this new economic and social era.
[more]
cover of Global Dynamics of Shi'a Marriages: Religion, Gender, and Belonging

Global Dynamics of Shi'a Marriages

Religion, Gender, and Belonging

Yafa Shanneik

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Muslim marriages have been the focus of considerable public debate in Europe and beyond, in Muslim-majority countries as well as in settings where Muslims are a minority. Most academic work has focused on how the majority Sunni Muslims conclude marriages. This volume, in contrast, focuses on Twelver Shi'a Muslims in Iran, Pakistan, Oman, Indonesia, Norway, and the Netherlands. The volume makes an original contribution to understanding the global dynamics of Shi'a marriage practices in a wide range of contexts--not only its geographical spread but also by providing a critical analysis of the socio-economic, religious, ethnic, and political discourses of each context. The book sheds light on new marriage forms presented through a bottom up approach focusing on the lived experiences of Shi'a Muslims negotiating a diverse range of relationships and forms of belonging.
[more]
cover of Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume 3: A Hitchhiker's Guide to Informal Problem-Solving in human life

Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume 3

A Hitchhiker's Guide to Informal Problem-Solving in human life

Edited by Alena Ledeneva

University College London, 2024

A journey through the informal and taken-for-granted ways of getting things done across the world.

For a post-human hitchhiker, human life–with its anxiety, aging, illness, and constant need for problem-solving–may look unviable. Yet, for humans, the life struggle is softened by human touch, human emotion, and human cooperation.

The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume 3 continues the journey of the two previous volumes into the world’s open secrets, unwritten rules, and hidden practices. It focuses on issues of emotional ambivalence and pressures of the digital age. The informal practices presented in this volume demonstrate the urgency of alleviating tensions between continuity and all-too-rapid change and the need to tackle the central problem of modern societies—uncertainty.

The volume takes the reader on a biographical journey through elusive, taken-for-granted, or banal ways of getting things done from over seventy countries and world regions. It offers an innovative understanding of the significance of fringes and challenges the assumption that informality is associated exclusively with poverty, underdevelopment, the Global South, oppressive regimes, or the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It also maps the patterns of informality around the globe, identifies specific informal practices in a context-sensitive way, and documents their ambivalent impact on people engaged in problem-solving, on societies in which these problems arise, and on humanity overall.
 
[more]
cover of Global Energy Shifts: Fostering Sustainability in a Turbulent Age

Global Energy Shifts

Fostering Sustainability in a Turbulent Age

Bruce Podobnik

Temple University Press, 2005

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the citizens of Great Britain faced a formidable challenge: coal resources seemed destined to run out and commentators were unable to foresee a viable alternative fuel. To address the crisis, military strategists were urged to seize control of coal in foreign lands, and companies were encouraged to increase domestic production of the resource.

In Global Energy Shifts, Bruce Podobnik draws intriguing parallels between the "coal panics" that once swept through Britain and the "oil panics" that grip the world today. His concise history of global energy use contextualizes the coal and oil scares, demonstrating how the convergence of specific geopolitical, commercial, and social conditions can generate rapid and far-reaching transformations in the energy foundations of our world.

Ultimately, Podobnik informs readers on how a "crisis" of one fuel system is quickly averted with the introduction of another, and describes opportunities for shifting our problematic, oil-based system toward a renewable energy system.
[more]
cover of Global Homophobia: States, Movements, and the Politics of Oppression

Global Homophobia

States, Movements, and the Politics of Oppression

Edited by Meredith L. Weiss and Michael J. Bosia

University of Illinois Press, 2013

While homophobia is commonly characterized as individual and personal prejudice, this collection of essays instead explores homophobia as a transnational political phenomenon. Editors Meredith L. Weiss and Michael J. Bosia theorize homophobia as a distinct configuration of repressive state-sponsored policies and practices with their own causes, explanations, and effects on how sexualities are understood and experienced in a variety of national contexts. The essays cover a broad range of geographic cases, including France, Ecuador, Iran, Lebanon, Poland, Singapore, and the United States.

Combining rich empirical analysis with theoretical synthesis, these studies examine how homophobia travels across complex and ambiguous transnational networks, how it achieves and exerts decisive power, and how it shapes the collective identities and strategies of those groups it targets. The first comparative volume to focus specifically on the global diffusion of homophobia and its implications for an emerging worldwide LGBT movement, Global Homophobia opens new avenues of debate and dialogue for scholars, students, and activists.

Contributors are Mark Blasius, Michael J. Bosia, David K. Johnson, Kapya J. Kaoma, Christine (Cricket) Keating, Katarzyna Korycki, Amy Lind, Abouzar Nasirzadeh, Conor O'Dwyer, Meredith L. Weiss, and Sami Zeidan.

[more]
cover of Global Perspectives on the United States: Pro-Americanism, Anti-Americanism, and the Discourses Between

Global Perspectives on the United States

Pro-Americanism, Anti-Americanism, and the Discourses Between

Edited by Virginia R. Dominguez and Jane C. Desmond

University of Illinois Press, 2017

This daring collaborative effort showcases dialogues between international scholars engaged with the United States from abroad. The writers investigate the analytic methods and choices that label certain talk, images, behaviors, and allusions as "American" and how to read the data on such material. The editors present the essays in pairs that overlap in theme or region. Each author subsequently comments on the other's work. A third scholar or team of scholars from a different discipline or geographic location then provides another level of analysis. Contributors: Andrzej Antoszek, Sophia Balakian, Zsófia Bán, Sabine Bröck, Ian Condry, Kate Delaney, Jane C. Desmond, Virginia R. Dominguez, Ira Dworkin, Richard Ellis, Guillermo Ibarra, Seyed Mohammad Marandi, Giorgio Mariani, Ana Mauad, Loes Nas, Edward Schatz, Manar Shorbagy, Kristin Solli, Amy Spellacy, and Michael Titlestad.
[more]
cover of Global Prescriptions: The Production, Exportation, and Importation of a New Legal Orthodoxy

Global Prescriptions

The Production, Exportation, and Importation of a New Legal Orthodoxy

Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2002

Global Prescriptions scrutinizes the movement to export a U.S.-oriented version of the " rule of law," found in the activities of philanthropic foundations, the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and several other developmental organizations. Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth have brought together a group of scholars from a variety of disciplines--anthropology, economics, history, law, political science, and sociology--to create tools for understanding this movement.
Comprised of two sections, the volume first develops theoretical perspectives key to an understanding of the production and impact of new "global legal prescriptions." The second part shifts attention to the national importation of these legal orthodoxies. The scholars provide a diverse set of sophisticated approaches, both to the circumstances promoting the production of these prescriptions and to the limitations of the prescriptions in the different national settings. Thus, Global Prescriptions provides a unique treatment for readers interested in globalization generally or the potential spread of the "rule of law" in particular.
This volume will intrigue scholars and students interested in a political science, economics, history, anthropology, law, and sociology.
Contributors are Jeremy Adelman, Robert Boyer, Elizabeth Heger Boyle, Miguel Angel Centeno, Heinz Klug, Larissa Adler Lomnitz, John W. Meyer, Setsuo Miyazawa, Hiroshi Otsuka, Rodrigo Salazar, Kathryn Sikkink, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Catalina Smulovitz.
Yves Dezalay is Director of Research, National Center for Scientific Research, Paris. Bryant G. Garth is Director of the American Bar Foundation.
[more]
cover of Globalization and Culture

Globalization and Culture

John Tomlinson

University of Chicago Press, 1999

Globalization is now widely discussed, but the debates often focus on economic issues. A lucid and engaging writer, John Tomlinson goes far beyond traditional discussions to analyze the wide-ranging cultural, social, and moral aspects of globalization.

Tomlinson begins this ambitious project by studying the relationship between globalization and contemporary culture, explaining the importance of time and space concerns, cultural imperialism, "deterritorialization," the impact of the media and communication technologies, and the possible growth of more cosmopolitan culture. We come to understand how someone may face unemployment as a result of downsizing decisions made at a company's head office on another continent, or how the food we find in our grocery stores is radically different today from twenty years ago. He discusses the uneven nature of the experience of global modernity in relation to first and third world countries, and concludes that a genuinely cosmopolitan culture is unlikely to emerge unless we respect cultural differences and share a common sense of commitment about the world.

[more]
cover of Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination: Notes on Fleeing the Plantation

Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination

Notes on Fleeing the Plantation

Michaeline A. Crichlow

Duke University Press, 2009

Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination is a major intervention into discussions of Caribbean practices gathered under the rubric of “creolization.” Examining sociocultural, political, and economic transformations in the Caribbean, Michaeline A. Crichlow argues that creolization—culture-creating processes usually associated with plantation societies and with subordinate populations remaking the cultural forms of dominant groups—must be liberated from and expanded beyond plantations, and even beyond the black Atlantic, to include productions of “culture” wherever vulnerable populations live in situations of modern power inequalities, from regimes of colonialism to those of neoliberalism. Crichlow theorizes a concept of creolization that speaks to how individuals from historically marginalized groups refashion self, time, and place in multiple ways, from creating art to traveling in search of homes. Grounding her theory in the material realities of Caribbean peoples in the plantation era and the present, Crichlow contends that creolization and Creole subjectivity are constantly in flux, morphing in response to the changing conditions of modernity and creatively expressing a politics of place.

Engaging with the thought of Michel Foucault, Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Achille Mbembe, Henri Lefebvre, Margaret Archer, Saskia Sassen, Pierre Bourdieu, and others, Crichlow argues for understanding creolization as a continual creative remaking of past and present moments to shape the future. She draws on sociology, philosophy, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies to illustrate how national histories are lived personally and how transnational experiences reshape individual lives and collective spaces. Critically extending Bourdieu’s idea of habitus, she describes how contemporary Caribbean subjects remake themselves in and beyond the Caribbean region, challenging, appropriating, and subverting older, localized forms of creolization. In this book, Crichlow offers a nuanced understanding of how Creole citizens of the Caribbean have negotiated modern economies of power.

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