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11 books match the query 'Contradictions'

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Caring on the Clock

The Complexities and Contradictions of Paid Care Work

Duffy, Mignon

Rutgers University Press, 2015

A nurse inserts an I.V. A personal care attendant helps a quadriplegic bathe and get dressed. A nanny reads a bedtime story to soothe a child to sleep. Every day, workers like these provide critical support to some of the most vulnerable members of our society. Caring on the Clock provides a wealth of insight into these workers, who take care of our most fundamental needs, often at risk to their own economic and physical well-being.

Caring on the Clock is the first book to bring together cutting-edge research on a wide range of paid care occupations, and to place the various fields within a comprehensive and comparative framework across occupational boundaries. The book includes twenty-two original essays by leading researchers across a range of disciplines—including sociology, psychology, social work, and public health. They examine the history of the paid care sector in America, reveal why paid-care work can be both personally fulfilling but also make workers vulnerable to burnout, emotional fatigue, physical injuries, and wage exploitation. Finally, the editors outline many innovative ideas for reform, including top-down and grassroots efforts to improve recognition, remuneration, and mobility for care workers.

As America faces a series of challenges to providing care for its citizens, including the many aging baby boomers, this volume offers a wealth of information and insight for policymakers, scholars, advocates, and the general public.

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From Two Republics to One Divided

Contradictions of Postcolonial Nationmaking in Andean Peru

Mark Thurner

Duke University Press, 2001

From Two Republics to One Divided examines Peru’s troubled transition from colonial viceroyalty to postcolonial republic from the local perspective of Andean peasant politics. Thurner’s reading of the Andean peasantry’s engagement and disengagement with the postcolonial state challenges long-standing interpretations of Peruvian and modern Latin American history and casts a critical eye toward Creole and Eurocentric ideas about citizenship and nationalism.
Working within an innovative and panoramic historical and linguistic framework, Thurner examines the paradoxes of a resurgent Andean peasant republicanism during the mid-1800s and provides a critical revision of the meaning of republican Peru’s bloodiest peasant insurgency, the Atusparia Uprising of 1885. Displacing ahistorical and nationalist readings of Inka or Andean continuity, and undermining the long-held notion that the colonial legacy is the dominant historical force shaping contemporary Andean reality, Thurner suggests that in Peru, the postcolonial legacy of Latin America’s nation-founding nineteenth century transfigured, and ultimately reinvented, the colonial legacy in its own image.

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Gender, Indian, Nation

The Contradictions of Making Ecuador, 1830–1925

Erin O'Connor

University of Arizona Press, 2007

Until recently, few scholars outside of Ecuador studied the country’s history. In the past few years, however, its rising tide of indigenous activism has brought unprecedented attention to this small Andean nation. Even so, until now the significance of gender issues to the development of modern Indian-state relations has not often been addressed. As she digs through Ecuador’s past to find key events and developments that explain the simultaneous importance and marginalization of indigenous women in Ecuador today, Erin O’Connor usefully deploys gender analysis to illuminate broader relationships between nation-states and indigenous communities.

O’Connor begins her investigations by examining the multilayered links between gender and Indian-state relations in nineteenth-century Ecuador. Disentangling issues of class and culture from issues of gender, she uncovers overlapping, conflicting, and ever-evolving patriarchies within both indigenous communities and the nation’s governing bodies. She finds that gender influenced sociopolitical behavior in a variety of ways, mediating interethnic struggles and negotiations that ultimately created the modern nation. Her deep research into primary sources—including congressional debates, ministerial reports, court cases, and hacienda records—allows a richer, more complex, and better informed national history to emerge.

Examining gender during Ecuadorian state building from “above” and “below,” O’Connor uncovers significant processes of interaction and agency during a critical period in the nation’s history. On a larger scale, her work suggests the importance of gender as a shaping force in the formation of nation-states in general while it questions recountings of historical events that fail to demonstrate an awareness of the centrality of gender in the unfolding of those events.

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Latin American Neostructuralism

The Contradictions of Post-Neoliberal Development

Fernando Ignacio Leiva

University of Minnesota Press, 2008

Interrogates this ascending political and economic paradigm

This landmark work is the first sustained critique of Latin American neostructuralism, the prevailing narrative that has sought to replace “market fundamentalism” and humanize the “savage capitalism” imposed by neoliberal dogmatism. Fernando Leiva analyzes neostructuralism and questions its credibility as the answer to the region’s economic, political, and social woes.

Recent electoral victories by progressive governments in Latin America promising economic growth, social equity, and political democracy raise a number of urgent questions, including: What are the key strengths and weaknesses of the emerging paradigm? What kinds of transformations can this movement enact? Leiva addresses these issues and argues that the power relations embedded in local institutions, culture, and populations must be recognized when building alternatives to the present order. Considering the governments in countries such as Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, Leiva examines neostructuralism’s impact on global politics and challenges whether this paradigm constitutes a genuine alternative to neoliberalism or is, rather, a more sophisticated form of consolidating existing systems.

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Media Freedom

The Contradictions of Communications in the Age of Modernity

Richard Barbrook

Pluto Press, 1995

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Nietzsche

His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His Philosophy

Wolfgang Muller-Lauter

University of Illinois Press, 1999

This is the first translation into English of a milestone in Nietzsche interpretation. Wolfgang Müller-Lauter examines Nietzsche's doctrines of the will to power and the overman in light of Nietzsche's philosophy of real contradictions. He shows that Nietzsche's vision of inherently contradictory "wills to power" is the source of irresolvable contradictions in his philosophy.

Müller-Lauter has remained at the forefront of German Nietzsche studies throughout the quarter century since this book first appeared. This long-awaited translation, containing two substantial subsequent essays, is a major addition to the English-language Nietzsche literature

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Prometheus Bedeviled

Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

Levitt, Norman

Rutgers University Press, 1999

In this lucid critique, Norman Levitt examines the strained relations between science and contemporary society. For the most part, Levitt states, we idolize musicians and cheer on athletes, yet we view scientists with a mixture of awe and unease. Significantly, too, we are unsure how scientific discovery actually fits into the broader schemes of politics, and policy. Even beyond pragmatic questions, we remain anxious about the implications of science for our basic understanding of human values and purpose.

One result of this uncertainty about scientific work is an ill-informed crusade to “democratize” science. It has become fashionable lately, Levitt states, for non-scientists to attempt to intervene in science policy, which often results in methodologically unsound decisions. The embrace of "alternative medicine" is a particularly ominous example.

Levitt suggests that science, by virtue of its accuracy and reliability, deserves to be at the top of the hierarchy of knowledge, and that our social institutions ought to take this fact strongly into account. Levitt hopes that Americans will become aware of the limitations of unchecked populism and will be willing to yield a bit of “democratic” control over certain questions in order to minimize the danger that sound science will be ignored or overridden. However, this trust in scientific methodology must be part of a broader understanding. Science must not only act responsibly toward our democratic institutions; it must also concede that our society has the right to decide what kinds of research are most consistent with larger goals and therefore deserve the most support.

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The Black Model Minority Student

African Immigrants and the Contradictions of Race in America

Mercy Agyepong

University of Chicago Press, 2027

Explores the contradictory perceptions of African immigrant students in New York City and reveals how anti-Blackness persists even within predominantly Black and Brown schools.

African immigrant students are often celebrated in the United States as academically successful and culturally disciplined. But what happens when praise itself becomes part of a racial hierarchy? In The Black Model Minority Student, sociologist of education Mercy Agyepong traces the complex experiences of West African immigrant students attending public high schools in New York City.

Using ethnographic and interview data from predominantly Black and Brown schools in the Bronx, Agyepong shows that African immigrant students are often viewed through two competing yet coexisting narratives: as intellectually capable and hardworking, yet also as uncivilized or socially inferior. These perceptions are not incidental, but central to how anti-Blackness operates and how racial hierarchies are sustained in the United States. While the model minority stereotype shaped their experiences in Black and Brown high schools, West African immigrant students found that this seemingly favorable stereotype mattered less once they graduated and entered the white spaces of higher education and other social settings. At every step, African students—regardless of their national origins—were disadvantaged by racial stereotypes.

Theoretically grounded yet deeply human, The Black Model Minority Student offers an important new perspective on race, immigration, and education in contemporary America.

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