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198 books match the query 'Community' and 6 start with n

cover of Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community

Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community

Bernard Yack

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Nationalism is one of modern history’s great surprises. How is it that the nation, a relatively old form of community, has risen to such prominence in an era so strongly identified with the individual? Bernard Yack argues that it is the inadequacy of our understanding of community—and especially the moral psychology that animates it—that has made this question so difficult to answer.

Yack develops a broader and more flexible theory of community and shows how to use it in the study of nations and nationalism. What makes nationalism such a powerful and morally problematic force in our lives is the interplay of old feelings of communal loyalty and relatively new beliefs about popular sovereignty. By uncovering this fraught relationship, Yack moves our understanding of nationalism beyond the oft-rehearsed debate between primordialists and modernists, those who exaggerate our loss of individuality and those who underestimate the depth of communal attachments.

A brilliant and compelling book, Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community sets out a revisionist conception of nationalism that cannot be ignored.

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cover of Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond

Native Hubs

Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond

Renya K. Ramirez

Duke University Press, 2007

Most Native Americans in the United States live in cities, where many find themselves caught in a bind, neither afforded the full rights granted U.S. citizens nor allowed full access to the tribal programs and resources—particularly health care services—provided to Native Americans living on reservations. A scholar and a member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, Renya K. Ramirez investigates how urban Native Americans negotiate what she argues is, in effect, a transnational existence. Through an ethnographic account of the Native American community in California’s Silicon Valley and beyond, Ramirez explores the ways that urban Indians have pressed their tribes, local institutions, and the federal government to expand conventional notions of citizenship.

Ramirez’s ethnography revolves around the Paiute American activist Laverne Roberts’s notion of the “hub,” a space that allows for the creation of a sense of belonging away from a geographic center. Ramirez describes “hub-making” activities in Silicon Valley, including sweat lodge ceremonies, powwows, and American Indian Alliance meetings, gatherings at which urban Indians reinforce bonds of social belonging and forge intertribal alliances. She examines the struggle of the Muwekma Ohlone, a tribe aboriginal to the San Francisco Bay area, to maintain a sense of community without a land base and to be recognized as a tribe by the federal government. She considers the crucial role of Native women within urban indigenous communities; a 2004 meeting in which Native Americans from Mexico and the United States discussed cross-border indigenous rights activism; and the ways that young Native Americans in Silicon Valley experience race and ethnicity, especially in relation to the area’s large Chicano community. A unique and important exploration of diaspora, transnationalism, identity, belonging, and community, Native Hubs is intended for scholars and activists alike.

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cover of Navajo Weaving in the Late Twentieth Century: Kin, Community, and Collectors

Navajo Weaving in the Late Twentieth Century

Kin, Community, and Collectors

Ann Lane Hedlund

University of Arizona Press, 2004

According to the Navajos, the holy people Spider Man and Spider Woman first brought the tools for weaving to the People. Over the centuries Navajo artists have used those tools to weave a web of beauty—a rich tradition that continues to the present day.

In testimony to this living art form, this book presents 74 dazzling color plates of Navajo rugs and wall hangings woven between 1971 and 1996. Drawn from a private southwestern collection, they represent the work of sixty of the finest native weavers in the American Southwest. The creations depicted here reflect a number of styles—revival, sandpainting, pictorial, miniature, sampler—and a number of major regional variations, from Ganado to Teec Nos Pos.

Textile authority Ann Hedlund provides an introductory narrative about the development of Navajo textile collecting—including the shift of attention from artifacts to art—and a brief review of the history of Navajo weaving. She then comments on the shaping of the particular collection represented in the book, offering a rich source of knowledge and insight for other collectors.

Explaining themes in Navajo weaving over the quarter-century represented by the Santa Fe Collection, Hedlund focuses on the development of modern rug designs and the influence on weavers of family, community, artistic identity, and the marketplace. She also introduces each section of plates with a description of the representative style, its significance, and the weavers who perpetuate and deviate from it. In addition to the textile plates, Hedlund’s color photographs show the families, landscapes, livestock, hogans, and looms that surround today’s Navajo weavers.

Navajo Weaving in the Late Twentieth Century explores many of the important connections that exist today among weavers through their families and neighbors, and the significant role that collectors play in perpetuating this dynamic art form. For all who appreciate American Indian art and culture, this book provides invaluable guidance to the fine points of collecting and a rich visual feast.
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cover of New Homeless And Old: Community and the Skid Row Hotel

New Homeless And Old

Community and the Skid Row Hotel

Charles Hoch

Temple University Press, 1990

"This book...will undoubtedly influence the course of future homeless research and policy. It represents the most comprehensive statement today of the realities of Skid Row life and of the pitfalls of contrasting 'new' and 'old' homeless populations." --American Journal of Sociology Blending detailed historical perspective with contemporary survey research, Charles Hoch and Robert Slayton argue that the answers to one of the most pressing problems of our time come from the poor themselves. Their examination of the Skid Row single room occupancy hotel (SRO) reveals how communities formed by low-income single-person households have for decades offered the security, personal autonomy, and privacy for the "old" homeless that the "new" homeless lack. And they show how public urban renewal efforts, which destroyed the bulk of these hotels with the intent to rid the inner city of the Skid Row homeless, actually laid the foundation for today's urban homeless crisis. Focusing on Chicago from 1870 to the present, but including case studies in other cities, Hoch and Slayton analyze how these SRO hotels operated in the past and claim that the term "flop house" really described a wide range of shelter types available to the poor according to their economic conditions. Based on their research, the authors conclude that policies for solving the homeless problem should focus mainly not on the homeless people, but on the institutional actors who benefit directly and indirectly from their predicament. This means changing public policies that encourage the destruction of affordable housing, especially SRO hotels, and implementing preservation, rehabilitation, and new construction policies instead. "The authors argue that government attitudes rooted in New Deal philosophy, and public confusion of this group's characteristics with those of a stereotypical Skid Row deviant, have resulted in inadequate planning for dealing with people who have a legitimate social problem and need enlightened attention. Recommended for professionals and academics." --Library Journal "Hoch and Slayton seem more savvy...about the political implications of housing and land-use policies. And they aren't shy about naming names, which makes their study more comprehensive and compelling." --Chicago Enterprise "New Homeless and Old breaks with the tradition of previous research in several welcome respects...the approach taken is refreshingly eclectic, weaving together historical materials, survey evidence, and intimate knowledge of the local scene. In a devastating critique of advocates' ameliorative efforts, they show bow both compassion--and entitlement--based appeals have encouraged 'shelterization,' thus threatening to institutionalize the homelessness problem." --Science
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cover of New Visions of Community in Contemporary American Fiction: Tan, Kingsolver, Castillo, Morrison

New Visions of Community in Contemporary American Fiction

Tan, Kingsolver, Castillo, Morrison

Magali Cornier Michael

University of Iowa Press, 2006

In this engaging, optimistic close reading of five late twentieth-century novels by American women, Magali Cornier Michael illuminates the ways in which their authors engage with ideas of communal activism, common commitment, and social transformation. The fictions she examines imagine coalition building as a means of moving toward new forms of nonhierarchical justice; for ethnic cultures that, as a result of racist attitudes, have not been assimilated, power with each other rather than power over each other is a collective goal.Michael argues that much contemporary American fiction by women offers models of care and nurturing that move away from the private sphere toward the public and political. Specifically, texts by women from such racially marked ethnic groups as African American, Asian American, Native American, and Mexican American draw from the rich systems of thought, histories, and experiences of these hybrid cultures and thus offer feminist and ethical revisions of traditional concepts of community, coalition, subjectivity, and agency.Focusing on Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven, Ana Castillo’s So Far from God, and Toni Morrison’s Paradise, Michael shows that each writer emphasizes the positive, liberating effects of kinship and community. These hybrid versions of community, which draw from other-than-dominant culturally specific ideas and histories, have something to offer Americans as the United States moves into an increasingly diverse twenty-first century. Michael provides a rich lens through which to view both contemporary fiction and contemporary life.
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cover of No Man Is An Island: Community and Commemoration on Norway's Utøya

No Man Is An Island

Community and Commemoration on Norway's Utøya

Jørgen Watne Frydnes, translated by Wendy H. Gabrielsen

University of Massachusetts Press, 2025

On July 22, 2011, a white supremacist killed eight people at Oslo’s Government Center in Norway and then terrorized the idyllic island of Utøya, where he executed sixty-nine more people, mostly teenagers. The country had never suffered such a massacre, and in the aftermath, the entire population was reeling.

Utøya, the Norwegian Labor Party’s summer camp for youth, a beloved place where many Norwegians learned about democratic values and processes, made lifelong friendships, and developed a vision for a just society, became mired in grief and discord. When Jørgen Watne Frydnes took on the daunting task of rebuilding the island and charting its future, he had to figure out a compassionate and just way forward. He made a radical decision: he set out to talk with each family of a murdered person, seeking to understand their needs and their hopes so that the future of the island could include their wishes and concerns. This emotionally grueling work, which was never considered in the scholarly literature on commemoration, led to a true renewal of Utøya, resulting in a meaningful memorial to those who were lost as well as beautiful surroundings for campers who come there to study democracy and peace.

Frydnes’s narrative, originally published in Norwegian, is structured around the seasons of the year and the landscape of the island, and tracks one person’s account of learning how to remember, commemorate, and honor the dead, and acknowledge a mass tragedy, and yet also create a nurturing, aspirational space for hope.

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