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2 books match the query 'Conway, Jill Ker'

cover of Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Humanistic Studies of the Environment

Earth, Air, Fire, Water

Humanistic Studies of the Environment

Jill Ker Conway

University of Massachusetts Press, 1999

Written in a clear, accessible style with a general audience in mind, the essays in this volume offer fresh approaches to thinking about environmental issues. When we consider the forms of environmental decline most urgently in need of attention—eroding soils, shrinking forests, expanding deserts, acid rain, ozone depletion, air pollution, poisoned water supplies, the loss of biological diversity—it may seem logical that scientists should be the people mobilized to tackle these problems. Yet to devise effective solutions for today's environmental threats, we must situate them within their larger historical, societal, and cultural settings. Amelioration does not require exclusively scientific knowledge, but also changes based upon law and public policy, on institutional structures and practices, on habits of consumption, and on countless other facets of daily life. Earth, Air, Fire, Water seeks to redirect our thinking about environmental issues by locating them in the behavior of human beings—in the institutions, beliefs, and practices that mediate between people and that obscure but beautiful nonhuman world we refer to as “nature.” The book opens with a section on the elements and the ways humans have understood them in the past. There follows a section devoted to social institutions and the ways in which we can learn from current and past efforts to study the interaction between people and nature. The concluding section analyzes the culture of modernity and the ways in which the human imagination has changed in response to the arrival of modern technology. In addition to the editors, contributors include Gregory Nagy, Donald Worster, Stephen J. Pyne, John F. Richards, Richard White, Terence Turner, Barbara Epstein, Oleg N. Yanitsky, Bina Agarwal, Anton Struchkov, Yaakov Garb, and Louis Menand.

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cover of The Politics of Women's Education: Perspectives from Asia, Africa, and Latin America

The Politics of Women's Education

Perspectives from Asia, Africa, and Latin America

Jill Ker Conway and Susan C. Bourque, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1995

In the last twenty-five years women have made remarkable progress in access to the classroom and broken new ground in educational opportunity, yet educational equity remains elusive and politically contested. The Politics of Women’s Education: Perspectives from Asia, Africa, and Latin America collects essays that reveal the complex changes in women's education throughout the world and together offer the first comprehensive assessment of what has been attempted, what remains to be done, and what the options are for reform.The volume presents the voices of Third World women and men relating their efforts to improve the position of women through education. They raise important questions for readers from both high- and low-income countries, questions about whether formal or nonformal education will best serve women’s needs; whether the state or private initiatives are most likely to succeed in raising women’s status through the delivery of transforming knowledge; and whether Western dreams of modernization have any relevance to non-Western societies.A diversity of countries is covered, including India, Pakistan, Korea, the Philippines, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Peru, and Brazil. Each contributor locates the issues surrounding women's education in the larger national context, thus unraveling the matrix that links gender and education to race, ethnicity, social class, and political change. Two essays offer analysis of the worldwide movement for women's education froma comparative perspective and raise fundamental questions about the relevance of the educational models, approaches, and assumptions currently in use.
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