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15 books match the query 'Generations'

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Aspiring in Later Life

Movements across Time, Space, and Generations

Megha Amrith

Rutgers University Press, 2023

In our highly interconnected and globalized world, people often pursue their aspirations in multiple places. Yet in public and scholarly debates, aspirations are often seen as the realm of younger, mobile generations, since they are assumed to hold the greatest potential for shaping the future. This volume flips this perspective on its head by exploring how aspirations are constructed from the vantage point of later life, and shows how they are pursued across time, space, and generations. The aspirations of older people are diverse, and relate not only to aging itself but also to planning the next generation’s future, preparing an "ideal" retirement, searching for intimacy and self-realization, and confronting death and afterlives. Aspiring in Later Life brings together rich ethnographic cases from different regions of the world, offering original insights into how aspirations shift over the course of life and how they are pursued in contexts of translocal mobility.

This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition.

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Central American Women in Diaspora

Testimonios of the Generations

Edited by Karina Alma and Ester E. Hernández

University of Arizona Press, 2026

This collection centers Central American women’s voices within the growing narrative of the Central American diaspora. It provides a tapestry of testimonios—from grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and sisters—who explore what it means to be Central American women in the United States.

Through the practice of testimonio, contributors create intergenerational dialogues between mothers and daughters, engage with Indigenous oral traditions, and reflect on the violent histories of war in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. The volume is organized around five themes: political histories, migration, gender and sexuality, navigating institutions, and healing. Within each theme contributors tackle a range of issues, including Central American political histories, healing, grief, Indigenous knowledge, memory, trauma, post-traumatic growth, organizing, creativity, and agency.

This anthology spans genres such as poetry, essay, and visual art to present diverse perspectives, including Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous, queer, and working-class voices. An intervention that centers gendered experiences and challenges oppressive structures, this volume celebrates the solidarity, cultural memory, and healing found within transnational ties.

Contributors
Leisy J. Abrego
Margoth Abrego
Bella
Juanita Cabrera López
Jennifer A. Cárcamo
Sandra Castro
Karla Cativo
Kency Cornejo
Gabriela Corona Valencia
Carolina Rivera Escamilla
Rafael Escamilla
Mildred Fuentes-Chung
Diana Gamez
Joanna Beltrán Girón
Ruth Girón
Victoria Gonzalez-Rivera
Claudia D. Hernández
Jessica Hernandez
Leticia Hernández-Linares
Leigh-Anna Hidalgo
Andrea Nikté Juarez Mendoza
Amanda Macal
Carla Macal
Patricia Veliz Macal
Kiara Aileen Machado
Beatriz Maldonado
Jacqueline Munguía
Joanna B. Pérez
Rossana Pérez
Katy Pinto
Claudia A. Portillo
Suyapa Portillo Villeda
Nalya Rodriguez
Jessica Saravia
Andrea Zelaya

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Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites?

The Asian Ethnic Experience Today

Mia Tuan

Rutgers University Press, 1999

What does it mean to be an Asian-American in the United States today? Are Asian-Americans considered "honorary whites" or forever thought of as "foreigners?"

Mia Tuan examines the salience and meaning of ethnicity for later generation Chinese- and Japanese-Americans, and asks how their concepts of ethnicity differ from that of white ethnic Americans. She interviewed 95 middle-class Chinese and Japanese Californians and analyzes the importance of ethnic identities and the concept of becoming a "real" American for both Asian and white ethnics. She asks her subjects about their early memories and experiences with Chinese/Japanese culture; current lifestyle and emerging cultural practices; experiences with racism and discrimination; and attitudes toward current Asian immigration.

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Generational Politics in the United States

From the Silents to Gen Z and Beyond

Sally Friedman and David Schultz, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2024

The role of generations is an important, yet often overlooked, variable in the study of American politics. A topic of research in sociology, business, and marketing, the focus on generations frequently occurs in American pop culture and journalism. The general public often assumes that different generations have different political leanings and beliefs—that the Silent Generation is all Republican, white, and conservative, or that Millennials are liberal and diverse—but are these assumptions true?

Generational Politics in the United States is the first comprehensive book that examines the concept of generations from a political science perspective. It defines what a generation is and how to sort out the differences between life cycle, cohort, and aging effect. The book then brings together chapters from an array of political science scholars that examine the role of generations in American politics and how it relates to other variables such as age, race, gender, and socioeconomic status. It discusses how politics in the United States are impacted by changes in generations, including how the passing of the Baby Boom generation and rise of the Millennials and Gen Z will change American politics. By examining the differences in political attitudes, engagement, and impact of recent generations, Generational Politics in the United States suggests how generational change will impact American politics in the future.

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Generations

Vilém Flusser

University of Minnesota Press, 2027

A vision of modern humanity trapped inside the system it has created

Written in the 1960s and unpublished until 2017, Generations is Vilém Flusser’s largest work and the foundation for many of his later theories on media and post-history. In this ambitious study of the Modern Age, Flusser traces a devastating shift in Western civilization that ultimately leads to the modern “apparatus”: the impersonal, cybernetic system of self-programmed objectification that has become our reality.

Flusser presents history as a recurring struggle between generations, with each new generation overturning the values of the former and eventually drifting into a state of existential avoidance. This cycle becomes the basis for a powerful diagnosis of the modern condition. Flusser identifies a critical shift toward self-worship and collective will in humanity’s understanding of progress and divinity during the Renaissance. This shift foregrounded our path toward an automated world driven by apathetic functionaries serving the apparatus and widespread fascist irrationalism, catastrophically realized during the Holocaust.

With surprising relevance to the digital present that gradually empties the world of its grounded reality, Generations offers a striking account of humanity’s relationship to technology, algorithms, and systems of control. Flusser’s concept of the “apparatus” anticipates the modern experience of being shaped by social media, bureaucratic systems, and oppressive technologies. Arguing that contemporary humanity exists in a state of slow existential stagnation rather than dramatic apocalypse, the book asks and answers a pressing question: how did we get here?

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

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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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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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Generations

Academic Feminists In Dialogue

Devoney Looser

University of Minnesota Press, 1997

Explores the conflicts and challenges facing older and younger feminist scholars.

In universities and colleges across the country, feminists are debating their histories and future legacies, often expressing these controversies in generational terms. Some older, second wave feminists accuse younger ones of being careerist, overly theoretical, insufficiently political, and not grateful enough to previous generations. Some third wave feminists consider their foremothers naive, universalizing, or elitist, resentful of deviations from their established plans and improperly wielding their power. Generations addresses these divisions and impasses through sophisticated analyses of the challenges of “passing the torch.”

Generations is composed of essays from academic women at various professional stages-from established scholars to junior professors to graduate students. Some are concerned with telling intergenerational feminist histories based on both research and experience. Others describe difficulties faced by feminists of all ages in the academy today. A final cluster considers issues in the highly charged convergence of feminist theory and postmodernism. The promise of feminisms yet to come can be found in these pages, alongside some of the most resonant and important feminist voices of the last two decades. Generations both complicates and enlivens the transmission and rebirth of feminist knowledges from one generation to another. Contributors: Diane Elam, U of Wales; Elizabeth Francis, Brown U; Linda Frost, U of Alabama; Jane Gallop, U of Wisconsin; Dana Heller, Old Dominion U; Jane Kalbfleisch; Jeanne Marecek, Swarthmore College; Nancy K. Miller, CUNY; Mona Narain, Otterbein College; Angela M. S. Nelson, Bowling Green State U; Judith Newton, U of California, Davis; Rebecca Dakin Quinn; Gita Rajan, Fairfield U; Judith Roof, Indiana U; Theresa Ann Sears, U of Missouri at St. Louis; Ruthe Thompson; Michele Wallace, CUNY; Barbara A. White, U of New Hampshire; Lynda Zwinger, U of Arizona.

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Living Through the Generations

Continuity and Change in Navajo Women’s Lives

Joanne McCloskey

University of Arizona Press, 2007

Navajo women’s lives reflect the numerous historical changes that have transformed “the Navajo way.” At the same time, in their behavior, beliefs, and values, women preserve the legacy of Navajo culture passed down through the generations. By comparing and contrasting three generations of Navajo women—grandmothers, mid-life mothers, and young mothers—similarities and differences emerge in patterns of education, work, family life, and childbearing. Women’s roles as mothers and grandmothers are central to their respected position in Navajo society. Mothers bestow membership in matrilineal clans at birth and follow the example of the beloved deity Changing Woman. As guardians of cultural traditions, grandmothers actively plan and participate in ceremonies such as the Kinaaldá, the puberty ceremony, for their granddaughters.

Drawing on ethnographic interviews with 77 women in Crownpoint, New Mexico, and surrounding chapters in the Eastern Navajo Agency, Joanne McCloskey examines the cultural traditions evident in Navajo women’s lives. Navajo women balance the demands of Western society with the desire to preserve Navajo culture for themselves and their families.

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Mestizo in America

Generations of Mexican Ethnicity in the Suburban Southwest

Thomas Macias

University of Arizona Press, 2006

How much does ethnicity matter to Mexican Americans today, when many marry outside their culture and some can’t even stomach menudo? This book addresses that question through a unique blend of quantitative data and firsthand interviews with third-plus-generation Mexican Americans. Latinos are being woven into the fabric of American life, to be sure, but in a way quite distinct from ethnic groups that have come from other parts of the world. By focusing on individuals’ feelings regarding acculturation, work experience, and ethnic identity—and incorporating Mexican-Anglo intermarriage statistics—Thomas Macias compares the successes and hardships of Mexican immigrants with those of previous European arrivals. He describes how continual immigration, the growth of the Latino population, and the Chicano Movement have been important factors in shaping the experience of Mexican Americans, and he argues that Mexican American identity is often not merely an “ethnic option” but a necessary response to stereotyping and interactions with Anglo society.Talking with fifty third-plus generation Mexican Americans from Phoenix and San Jose—representative of the seven million nationally with at least one immigrant grandparent—he shows how people utilize such cultural resources as religion, spoken Spanish, and cross-national encounters to reinforce Mexican ethnicity in their daily lives. He then demonstrates that, although social integration for Mexican Americans shares many elements with that of European Americans, forces related to ethnic concentration, social inequality, and identity politics combine to make ethnicity for Mexican Americans more fixed across generations. Enhancing research already available on first- and second-generation Mexican Americans, Macias’s study also complements research done on other third-plus-generation ethnic groups and provides the empirical data needed to understand the commonalities and differences between them. His work plumbs the changing meaning of mestizaje in the Americas over five centuries and has much to teach us about the long-term assimilation and prospects of Mexican-origin people in the United States.

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Millennials in Architecture

Generations, Disruption, and the Legacy of a Profession

Darius Sollohub

University of Texas Press, 2019

Much has been written about Millennials, but until now their growing presence in the field of architecture has not been examined in depth. In an era of significant challenges stemming from explosive population growth, climate change, and the density of cities, Millennials in Architecture embraces the digitally savvy disruptors who are joining the field at a crucial time as it grapples with the best ways to respond to a changing physical world.

Taking a clear-eyed look at the new generation in the context of the design professions, Darius Sollohub begins by situating Millennials in a line of generations stretching back to early Modernism, exploring how each generation negotiates the ones before and after. He then considers the present moment, closely evaluating the significance of Millennial behaviors and characteristics (from civic-mindedness to collaboration, and time management in a 24/7 culture), all underpinned by fluency in the digital world. The book concludes with an assessment of the profound changes and opportunities that Millennial disruption will bring to education, licensure, and firm management. Encouraging new alliances, Millennials in Architecture is an essential resource for the architectural community and its stakeholders.

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