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15 books match the query 'Exploitation'

cover of A History of Tourism in Africa: Exoticization, Exploitation, and Enrichment

A History of Tourism in Africa

Exoticization, Exploitation, and Enrichment

Todd Cleveland

Ohio University Press, 2021

An engaging social history of foreign tourists’ dreams, the African tourism industry’s efforts to fulfill them, and how both sides affect each other.

Since the nineteenth century, foreign tourists and resident tourism workers in Africa have mutually relied upon notions of exoticism, but from vastly different perspectives. Many of the countless tourists who have traveled to the African continent fail to acknowledge or even realize that skilled African artists in the tourist industry repeatedly manufacture “authentic” experiences in order to fulfill foreigners’ often delusional, or at least uninformed, expectations. These carefully nurtured and controlled performances typically reinforce tourists’ reductive impressions—formed over centuries—of the continent, its peoples, and even its wildlife. In turn, once back in their respective homelands, tourists’ accounts of their travels often substantiate, and thereby reinforce, prevailing stereotypes of “exotic” Africa. Meanwhile, Africans’ staged performances not only impact their own lives, primarily by generating remunerative opportunities, but also subject the continent’s residents to objectification, exoticization, and myriad forms of exploitation.

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cover of Augmented Exploitation: Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Work

Augmented Exploitation

Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Work

Phoebe Moore

Pluto Press, 2021

Artificial Intelligence is a seemingly neutral technology, but it is increasingly used to manage workforces and make decisions to hire and fire employees. Its proliferation in the workplace gives the impression of a fairer, more efficient system of management. A machine can't discriminate, after all. Augmented Exploitation explores the reality of the impact of AI on workers' lives. While the consensus is that AI is a completely new way of managing a workplace, the authors show that, on the contrary, AI is used as most technologies are used under capitalism: as a smokescreen that hides the deep exploitation of workers. Going beyond platform work and the gig economy, the authors explore emerging forms of algorithmic governance and AI-augmented apps that have been developed to utilise innovative ways to collect data about workers and consumers, as well as to keep wages and worker representation under control. They also show that workers are not taking this lying down, providing case studies of new and exciting form of resistance that are springing up across the globe.
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cover of Brutal: Manhood and the Exploitation of Animals

Brutal

Manhood and the Exploitation of Animals

Brian Luke

University of Illinois Press, 2007

The first integrated theory of manhood's relationship to hunting, animal experimentation, and animal sacrifice

In Brutal, Brian Luke explores the gender divide over our treatment of animals, exposing the central role of masculinity in systems of animal exploitation. Employing philosophical analysis, reference to empirical research, and relevant personal experience, Luke develops a new theory of how exploitative institutions do not work to promote human flourishing but instead merely act as support for a particular construction of manhood. The resulting work is of significant interest both to animal advocates and opponents of sexism.

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cover of Children of Other Worlds: Exploitation in the Global Market

Children of Other Worlds

Exploitation in the Global Market

Jeremy Seabrook

Pluto Press, 2001

More than 40,000 children die daily in the developing world from avoidable sickness and disease. Tens of millions of children labour in mines, mills and sweatshops, or scavenge for a living on city streets and dumps. In the so-called developed world, children's lives are similarly blighted by drugs, alcohol, sexual abuse and violence.
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cover of Class Matters: Inequality and Exploitation in 21st-Century Britain

Class Matters

Inequality and Exploitation in 21st-Century Britain

Charles Umney

Pluto Press, 2018

Despite many changes to society, education, and the labor market, social class remains a fundamental force in British life in the twenty-first century. Yet we have lacked any compelling Marxist analysis of class in Britain today—until now. Charles Umney here moves Marx from the mills and mines that drove his analysis in his era into our own, with its call centers, office blocks, and fast food chains. Showing how Marxist concepts remain powerfully explanatory, Umney argues that understanding them is vital to fights against pay inequality, decreasing job security, and managerial control of the labor process. Class, Umney shows, must be understood as a dynamic and exploitative process integral to capitalism, rather than as a simple descriptive category, if we are going to better understand why capital continues to gain at the expense of labor.
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cover of Contingency, Exploitation, and Solidarity: Labor and Action in English Composition

Contingency, Exploitation, and Solidarity

Labor and Action in English Composition

Seth Kahn

University Press of Colorado, 2017

Composition has been a microcosm of the corporatization of higher education for thirty years, with adjuncts often handling the hard work of writing instruction. We've learned enough to know that change is needed. Influenced by the efforts of organizations such as New Faculty Majority, Faculty Forward, PrecariCorps, and national faculty unions, this collection highlights action, describing efforts that have improved adjunct working conditions in English departments. The editors categorize these efforts into five threads: strategies for self-advocacy; organizing within and across ranks; professionalizing in complex contexts; working for local changes to workload, pay, and material conditions; and protecting gains.

Contributors to this collection include contingent and tenure-line faculty from private, public, and community colleges, as well as writing program administrators and writing center faculty. Their voices address contingency, exploitation, and solidarity in activist terms deriving from institutional realities and cases. Collectively, they offer creative and constructive responses that can enact labor justice and champion the disciplinary energies of all members of our collegial community.

Contributors: Janelle Adsit​, ​Jacob Babb​, ​Chris Blankenship​, ​Rebekah Shultz Colby​, ​Richard Colby​, ​Anicca Cox​, ​Sue Doe​, ​Tracy Donhardt​, ​Dawn Fels​, ​Barbara Heiffero​n, ​Desirée M. Holter​, ​Justin Jory​, ​Jeffrey Klausman​, ​Michelle LaFrance​, ​Sarah Layden​, ​Carol Lind​, ​Maria Maist​o, ​Amanda Martin​, ​Mark McBeth​, ​Tim McCormack​, ​Joan Mulli​n, ​Dani Nier-Weber​, ​Glenn Moomau​, ​Michael Murphy​, ​Anna K. Nardo​, ​Rolf Norgaard​, ​Courtney Adams Wooten​, ​Lacey Wootton​, ​Allison Laubach Wright

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cover of Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society

Information Politics

Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society

Tim Jordan

Pluto Press, 2015

Conflict over information has become a central part of twenty-first century politics and culture. Currents of liberation and exploitation course through the debates about Edward Snowden and surveillance, Anonymous, the Arab Spring, search engines, and social media. In Information Politics, Tim Jordan confronts contemporary panic about whether we are being controlled by digital systems, such as social networks, iPhones, and Google. He approaches these issues in relation to the information politics that have emerged with the rise of mass digital cultures and the internet. Within our modern world, he argues for possibilities of rebellion and liberation interwoven among social and political conflicts including gender, class, and ecology.
            The first of Pluto Press’s new Digital Barricades series, focusing on ground-breaking critical explorations of resistance within the digital world, Information Politics explores the exploitations both facilitated by, and contested through, increases in information flows; the embedding of information technologies in daily life; and the intersection of network and control protocols. Anyone hoping to get to grips with the rapidly changing terrain of digital culture and conflict should start here.
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cover of Mexican Women in American Factories: Free Trade and Exploitation on the Border

Mexican Women in American Factories

Free Trade and Exploitation on the Border

By Carolyn Tuttle

University of Texas Press, 2012

Prior to the millennium, economists and policy makers argued that free trade between the United States and Mexico would benefit both Americans and Mexicans. They believed that NAFTA would be a “win-win” proposition that would offer U.S. companies new markets for their products and Mexicans the hope of living in a more developed country with the modern conveniences of wealthier nations. Blending rigorous economic and statistical analysis with concern for the people affected, Mexican Women in American Factories offers the first assessment of whether NAFTA has fulfilled these expectations by examining its socioeconomic impact on workers in a Mexican border town.

Carolyn Tuttle led a group that interviewed 620 women maquila workers in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. The responses from this representative sample refute many of the hopeful predictions made by scholars before NAFTA and reveal instead that little has improved for maquila workers. The women’s stories make it plain that free trade has created more low-paying jobs in sweatshops where workers are exploited. Families of maquila workers live in one- or two-room houses with no running water, no drainage, and no heat. The multinational companies who operate the maquilas consistently break Mexican labor laws by requiring women to work more than nine hours a day, six days a week, without medical benefits, while the minimum wage they pay workers is insufficient to feed their families. These findings will make a crucial contribution to debates over free trade, CAFTA-DR, and the impact of globalization.

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cover of On the Frontier of Science: An American Rhetoric of Exploration and Exploitation

On the Frontier of Science

An American Rhetoric of Exploration and Exploitation

Leah Ceccarelli

Michigan State University Press, 2013

“The frontier of science” is a metaphor that has become ubiquitous in American rhetoric, from its first appearance in the public address of early twentieth-century American intellectuals and politicians who aligned a mythic national identity with scientific research, to its more recent use in scientists’ arguments in favor of increased research funding. Here, Leah Ceccarelli explores what is selected and what is deflected when this metaphor is deployed, its effects on those who use it, and what rhetorical moves are made by those who try to counter its appeal. In her research, Ceccarelli discovers that “the frontier of science” evokes a scientist who is typically male, a risk taker, an adventurous loner—someone separated from a public that both envies and distrusts him, with a manifest destiny to penetrate the unknown. It conjures a competitive desire to claim the riches of a new territory before others can do the same. Closely reading the public address of scientists and politicians and the reception of their audiences, this book shows how the frontier of science metaphor constrains American speakers, helping to guide the ends of scientific research in particular ways and sometimes blocking scientists from attaining the very goals they set out to achieve.
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cover of The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America

The Black Tax

150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America

Andrew W. Kahrl

University of Chicago Press, 2024

Revealing a history that is deep, broad, and infuriating, The Black Tax casts a bold light on the racist practices long hidden in the shadows of America’s tax regimes.
 
American taxation is unfair, and it is most unfair to the very people who critically need its support. Not only do taxpayers with fewer resources—less wealth, power, and land—pay more than the well-off, but they are forced to fight for their rights within an unjust system that undermines any attempts to improve their position or economic standing. In The Black Tax, Andrew W. Kahrl reveals the shocking history and ruinous consequences of inequitable and predatory tax laws in this country—above all, widespread and devastating racial dispossession.
 
Throughout the twentieth century, African Americans acquired substantial amounts of property nationwide. But racist practices, obscure processes, and outright theft diminished their holdings and their power. Of these, Kahrl shows, few were more powerful, or more quietly destructive, than property taxes. He examines all the structural features and hidden traps within America’s tax system that have forced Black Americans to pay more for less and stripped them of their land and investments, and he reveals the staggering cost. The story of America’s now enormous concentration of wealth at the top—and the equally enormous absence of wealth among most Black households—has its roots here.
 
Kahrl exposes the painful history of these practices, from Reconstruction up to the present, and tells, for the first time, the story of Black Americans’ experiences as taxpayers and their fight for a more fair and equitable system for raising and spending the public’s money. This is a history that deepens our understanding of the disadvantages and persistent inequalities that African American households continue to face and reveals hidden engines of economic inequality in America. Detailing the hows and whys of America’s profoundly unequal tax system, The Black Tax equips readers with the knowledge needed to combat inequality and injustice today.
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cover of The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America

The Black Tax

150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America

Andrew W. Kahrl

University of Chicago Press, 2024

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

Revealing a history that is deep, broad, and infuriating, The Black Tax casts a bold light on the racist practices long hidden in the shadows of America’s tax regimes.

 
American taxation is unfair, and it is most unfair to the very people who critically need its support. Not only do taxpayers with fewer resources—less wealth, power, and land—pay more than the well-off, but they are forced to fight for their rights within an unjust system that undermines any attempts to improve their position or economic standing. In The Black Tax, Andrew W. Kahrl reveals the shocking history and ruinous consequences of inequitable and predatory tax laws in this country—above all, widespread and devastating racial dispossession.
 
Throughout the twentieth century, African Americans acquired substantial amounts of property nationwide. But racist practices, obscure processes, and outright theft diminished their holdings and their power. Of these, Kahrl shows, few were more powerful, or more quietly destructive, than property taxes. He examines all the structural features and hidden traps within America’s tax system that have forced Black Americans to pay more for less and stripped them of their land and investments, and he reveals the staggering cost. The story of America’s now enormous concentration of wealth at the top—and the equally enormous absence of wealth among most Black households—has its roots here.
 
Kahrl exposes the painful history of these practices, from Reconstruction up to the present, and tells, for the first time, the story of Black Americans’ experiences as taxpayers and their fight for a more fair and equitable system for raising and spending the public’s money. This is a history that deepens our understanding of the disadvantages and persistent inequalities that African American households continue to face and reveals hidden engines of economic inequality in America. Detailing the hows and whys of America’s profoundly unequal tax system, The Black Tax equips readers with the knowledge needed to combat inequality and injustice today.
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cover of The Cost of Free Shipping: Amazon in the Global Economy

The Cost of Free Shipping

Amazon in the Global Economy

Jake Alimahomed-Wilson

Pluto Press, 2021

Winner of the United Association for Labor Education Book Award 2021, this is essential reading for everyone who wants to understand the role of Amazon in our economy and society. With Amazon, supply-chain, and unionization in the news, it is both timely and incredibly informative.

Amazon is the most powerful corporation on the planet and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, has become one of the richest individuals in history, and one of the few people to profit from a global pandemic. Its dominance has reshaped the global economy itself: we live in the age of “Amazon Capitalism.” 

“One-click” instant consumerism and its immense variety of products has made Amazon a worldwide household name, with over 60% of US households subscribing to Amazon Prime. In turn, these subscribers are surveilled by the corporation. Amazon is also one of the world's largest logistics companies, resulting in weakened unions and lowered labor standards.

The company has also become the largest provider of cloud-computing services and home surveillance systems, not to mention the ubiquitous Alexa.

With cutting-edge analyses, this book looks at the many dark facets of the corporation, including automation, surveillance, tech work, workers' struggles, algorithmic challenges, the disruption of local democracy and much more. The Cost of Free Shipping shows how Amazon represents a fundamental shift in global capitalism that we should name, interrogate, and be primed to resist.
 

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cover of Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11: Horror, Exploitation, and the Cinema of Sensation

Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11

Horror, Exploitation, and the Cinema of Sensation

Aaron Michael Kerner

Rutgers University Press, 2015

Saw, Hostel, The Devil’s Rejects: this wave of horror movies has been classed under the disparaging label “torture porn.” Since David Edelstein coined the term for a New York magazine article a few years after 9/11, many critics have speculated that these movies simply reflect iconic images, anxieties, and sadistic fantasies that have emerged from the War on Terror. In this timely new study, Aaron Kerner challenges that interpretation, arguing that “torture porn” must be understood in a much broader context, as part of a phenomenon that spans multiple media genres and is rooted in a long tradition of American violence. 
 
Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11 tackles a series of tough philosophical, historical, and aesthetic questions: What does it mean to call a film “sadistic,” and how has this term been used to shut down critical debate? In what sense does torture porn respond to current events, and in what ways does it draw from much older tropes? How has torture porn been influenced by earlier horror film cycles, from slasher movies to J-horror? And in what ways has the torture porn aesthetic gone mainstream, popping up in everything from the television thriller Dexter to the reality show Hell’s Kitchen? 
 
Reflecting a deep knowledge and appreciation for the genre, Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11 is sure to resonate with horror fans. Yet Kerner’s arguments should also strike a chord in anyone with an interest in the history of American violence and its current and future ramifications for the War on Terror. 
 
 
 
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cover of Utrecht University and Colonial Knowledge: Exploration, Exploitation and the Civilising Mission since 1636

Utrecht University and Colonial Knowledge

Exploration, Exploitation and the Civilising Mission since 1636

Henk van Rinsum

Amsterdam University Press, 2025

In this book, Henk van Rinsum provides an in-depth description of the colonial past of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, from its foundation in 1636. He describes the development of (scientific) knowledge and knowledge transfer about and in the Dutch colonies, especially in the Dutch East Indies. The central theme of his book is the idea of Western superiority – the assumption that we are ‘developed’ and therefore modern, while those in the colonies are ‘not (yet) developed’ and therefore primitive or traditional. This colonial past is also the framework in which Utrecht University became involved in slavery and its abolition.
Henk van Rinsum shows how the knowledge acquired in the colony also contributed significantly to the scientific development of the university, especially towards the end of the nineteenth century. Utrecht University and Colonial Knowledge is therefore an important contribution to both colonial and intellectual history.
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cover of White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation

White Burgers, Black Cash

Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation

Naa Oyo A. Kwate

University of Minnesota Press, 2023

The long and pernicious relationship between fast food restaurants and the African American community

  • James Beard Foundation: James Beard Media Award for Reference, History, and Scholarship — Winner
  • Urban Affairs Association Best Book in Urban Affairs — Winner
  • Association for Humanist Sociology Betty and McClung Lee Book Award — Winner
  • Black Caucus of the American Library Association — Honor, Nonfiction category
  • Museum of African American History Stone Book Award — Shortlist
  • Business History Conference: Hagley Prize — Finalist
  • Association for the Study of Food and Society: ASFS Book Award — Winner
  • Society for the Study of Social Problems: Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Outstanding Book Award — Winner
  • Foreword: INDIES — Silver winner, History category

Today, fast food is disproportionately located in Black neighborhoods and marketed to Black Americans through trgeted advertising. But throughout much of the twentieth century, fast food was developed specifically for White urban and suburban customers, purposefully avoiding Black spaces. In White Burgers, Black Cash, Naa Oyo A. Kwate traces the evolution in fast food from the early 1900s to the present, from its long history of racist exclusion to its current damaging embrace of urban Black communities.

Fast food has historically been tied to the country’s self-image as the land of opportunity and is marketed as one of life’s simple pleasures, but a more insidious history lies at the industry’s core. White Burgers, Black Cash investigates the complex trajectory of restaurant locations from a decided commitment to Whiteness to the disproportionate densities that characterize Black communities today. Kwate expansively charts fast food’s racial and spatial transformation and centers the cities of Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C., in a national examination of the biggest brands of today, including White Castle, KFC, Burger King, McDonald’s, and more.

Deeply researched, compellingly told, and brimming with surprising details, White Burgers, Black Cash reveals the inequalities embedded in America’s popular national food tradition.

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