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Collective Movements and Emerging Political Spaces (Routledge Studies in International Political Sociology)
by Angharad Closs StephensCollective Movements and Emerging Political Spaces addresses the politics of new forms of collective movements, ranging from anti‑austerity protests to migrant struggles and anticolonial demonstrations.Drawing on examples from various countries, as well as struggles taking place across borders, this book traces the emergence of new practices of being political, described as ‘collective movements’. These represent something looser than a common identity – long held as necessary for a political struggle to cohere. They also suggest a different understanding of emancipation to the promise of transformation in time. By addressing various examples of ‘collective movements’, the chapters in this book examine other ways of being political together, formed through relations carved in cramped spaces or small movements that rearrange our ideas about what is possible. Drawing on the temporary and fleeting nature of many migrants’ struggles, the chapters develop concepts and approaches that acknowledge how such mobilisations trouble many standard political sociological categories – including nation, identity and citizenship. In combining an attentiveness to theories of affect, emotion and atmosphere, they also go beyond a focus on either individuals or collectives, to address the ways bodies are moved by the world and by others. Overall, the chapters propose new questions, methods and starting points for addressing collective movements in emerging political spaces, and for understanding how what counts as politics is being redrawn on the ground.This book will interest students, researchers and scholars of international political sociology, human geography, international relations, critical security studies and migration studies.
Chudley and Greeno's Building Construction Handbook
by Roy Chudley Roger Greeno Karl KovacThe 13th edition of Chudley and Greeno’s Building Construction Handbook remains THE authoritative reference for all construction students and professionals. The principles and processes of construction are explained with the concepts of design included where appropriate. Extensive coverage of building construction practice, techniques and regulations representing both traditional procedures and modern developments are included to provide the most comprehensive and easy-to-understand guide to building construction.This new edition has been updated to reflect recent changes to the Building Regulations, as well as including new material on modern methods of construction, greater emphasis on sustainability, health and safety, and coverage of heat pumps, photovoltaics, underfloor heating and rainwater harvesting.Chudley and Greeno’s Building Construction Handbook is the essential, easy-to-use resource for undergraduate and vocational students on a wide range of courses including NVQ and BTEC National, through to Higher National Certificate and Diploma, to Foundation and three-year degree level. It is also a useful practical reference for building designers, contractors and others engaged in the construction industry.
Risk in Children’s Adventure Literature (Children's Literature and Culture)
by Elly McCauslandRisk in Children’s Adventure Literature examines the way in which adults discuss the reading and entertainment habits of children, and with it the assumption that adventure is a timeless and stable constant whose meaning and value is self-evident. A closer enquiry into British and American adventure texts for children over the past 150 years reveals a host of complexities occluded by the term, and the ways in which adults invoke adventure as a means of attempting to get to grips with the nebulous figure of ‘the child’. Writing about adventure also necessitates writing about risk, and this book argues that adults have historically used adventure to conceptualise the relationship between children and risk: the risks children themselves pose to society; the risks that threaten their development; and how they can be trained to manage risk in socially normative and desirable ways. Tracing this tendency back to its development and consolidation in Victorian imperial romance, and forward through various adventure texts and media to the present day, this book probes and investigates the truisms and assumptions that underlie our generalisations about children’s love for adventure, and how they have evolved since the mid-nineteenth century.
Pedagogies of Biomedical Science: A Holistic Approach to Integrating Pedagogy Across the Curriculum (Contemporary Pedagogies of Medical and Health Professions’ Education)
by Donna JohnsonThis book confronts the continually evolving nature of biomedical science education by providing a robust account of learning pedagogies and best practice for scholars and researchers in the field.Rather than considering subdisciplines of biomedical science education separately, the volume takes a holistic approach and considers the complexities of teaching biomedical science as a whole, providing a nuanced overview of how a particular practice fits in such a course overall, as well as providing support for development within the reader’s own subdiscipline. Ultimately, this holistic approach allows for expansive discussion of relevant pedagogical approaches that will directly inform innovations in the contemporary teaching of biomedical science education.Novel in approach and underpinned by the latest in research innovations, this book will appeal to scholars, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of medical education, higher education, and curriculum studies. Policy makers involved with health education and promotion as well as educational research will also benefit from the volume.
Preserving Planet Earth: Changing Human Culture with Lessons from the Past
by Jane Roland MartinThis book encourages readers to acknowledge humanity’s contribution to the environmental crisis, proposing a way forward by exploring the power of ordinary people to bring about large-scale cultural change.Is it possible for humankind to change its ways and shed the belief that the planet is ours to do with as we like? Internationally acclaimed philosopher of education Jane Roland Martin argues that "humancentrism" is a learned affair, and what is learned can be unlearned. Turning to the past to see how large-scale cultural change has occurred, she discovers a pattern in the achievements of such historical luminaries as Martin Luther, Mahatma Gandhi, Rosa Parks and Greta Thunberg that we too can follow. Drawing on history, philosophy, and literature as well as the natural and social sciences and hoping to mobilize readers to effective action, Martin employs an accessible and powerful rhetoric, with each chapter beginning with a scene from history written in dialogue form.This book calls on young and old to avert a looming tragedy of Aristotelian proportions--the demise of the “Mother Nature” that made it possible for our species to flourish. Thoroughly interdisciplinary in its approach, it will appeal to students and teachers as well as general readers interested in environmental studies, philosophy, and education.
We Made Uranium!: And Other True Stories from the University of Chicago's Extraordinary Scavenger Hunt
by Leila SalesItem #176: A fire drill. No, not an exercise in which occupants of a building practice leaving the building safely. A drill which safely emits a bit of fire, the approximate shape and size of a drill bit. Item #74: Enter a lecture class in street clothes. Receive loud phone call. Shout “I NEED TO GO, THE CITY NEEDS ME!” Remove street clothes to reveal superhero apparel. Run out for the good of the land. Item #293: Hypnotizing a chicken seems easy, but if the Wikipedia article on the practice is to be believed, debate on the optimal method is heated. Do some trials on a real chicken and submit a report . . . for science of course. Item #234: A walking, working, people-powered but preferably wind-powered Strandbeest. Item #188: Fattest cat. Points per pound. The University of Chicago’s annual Scavenger Hunt (or “Scav”) is one of the most storied college traditions in America. Every year, teams of hundreds of competitors scramble over four days to complete roughly 350 challenges. The tasks range from moments of silliness to 1,000-mile road trips, and they call on participants to fully embrace the absurd. For students it is a rite of passage, and for the surrounding community it is a chance to glimpse the lighter side of a notoriously serious university.We Made Uranium! shares the stories behind Scav, told by participants and judges from the hunt’s more than thirty-year history. The twenty-three essays range from the shockingly successful (a genuine, if minuscule, nuclear reaction created in a dorm room) to the endearing failures (it’s hard to build a carwash for a train), and all the chicken hypnotisms and permanent tattoos in between. Taken together, they show how a scavenger hunt once meant for blowing off steam before finals has grown into one of the most outrageous annual traditions at any university. The tales told here are absurd, uplifting, hilarious, and thought-provoking—and they are all one hundred percent true.
The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Women In Culture And Society Ser.)
by Margaret F. RosenthalThe Venetian courtesan has long captured the imagination as a female symbol of sexual license, elegance, beauty, and unruliness. What then to make of the cortigiana onesta—the honest courtesan who recast virtue as intellectual integrity and offered wit and refinement in return for patronage and a place in public life? Veronica Franco (1546-1591) was such a woman, a writer and citizen of Venice, whose published poems and familiar letters offer rich testimony to the complexity of the honest courtesan's position. Margaret F. Rosenthal draws a compelling portrait of Veronica Franco in her cultural social, and economic world. Rosenthal reveals in Franco's writing a passionate support of defenseless women, strong convictions about inequality, and, in the eroticized language of her epistolary verses, the seductive political nature of all poetic contests. It is Veronica Franco's insight into the power conflicts between men and women—and her awareness of the threat she posed to her male contemporaries—that makes her literary works and her dealings with Venetian intellectuals so pertinent today. Combining the resources of biography, history, literary theory, and cultural criticism, this sophisticated interdisciplinary work presents an eloquent and often moving account of one woman's life as an act of self-creation and as a complex response to social forces and cultural conditions. "A book . . . pleasurably redolent of Venice in the 16th-century. Rosenthal gives a vivid sense of a world of salons and coteries, of intricate networks of family and patronage, and of literary exchanges both intellectual and erotic."—Helen Hackett, Times Higher Education SupplementThe Honest Courtesan is the basis for the film Dangerous Beauty (1998) directed by Marshall Herskovitz. (The film was re-titled The Honest Courtesan for release in the UK and Europe in 1999.)
Abundant Earth: Toward an Ecological Civilization
by Eileen CristIn Abundant Earth, Eileen Crist not only documents the rising tide of biodiversity loss, but also lays out the drivers of this wholesale destruction and how we can push past them. Looking beyond the familiar litany of causes—a large and growing human population, rising livestock numbers, expanding economies and international trade, and spreading infrastructures and incursions upon wildlands—she asks the key question: if we know human expansionism is to blame for this ecological crisis, why are we not taking the needed steps to halt our expansionism? Crist argues that to do so would require a two-pronged approach. Scaling down calls upon us to lower the global human population while working within a human-rights framework, to deindustrialize food production, and to localize economies and contract global trade. Pulling back calls upon us to free, restore, reconnect, and rewild vast terrestrial and marine ecosystems. However, the pervasive worldview of human supremacy—the conviction that humans are superior to all other life-forms and entitled to use these life-forms and their habitats—normalizes and promotes humanity’s ongoing expansion, undermining our ability to enact these linked strategies and preempt the mounting suffering and dislocation of both humans and nonhumans.Abundant Earth urges us to confront the reality that humanity will not advance by entrenching its domination over the biosphere. On the contrary, we will stagnate in the identity of nature-colonizer and decline into conflict as we vie for natural resources. Instead, we must chart another course, choosing to live in fellowship within the vibrant ecologies of our wild and domestic cohorts, and enfolding human inhabitation within the rich expanse of a biodiverse, living planet.
Democracy for Busy People
by Kevin J. ElliottAdvances an alternative approach to democratic reform that focuses on building institutions that empower people who have little time for politics. How do we make democracy more equal? Although in theory, all citizens in a democracy have the right to participate in politics, time-consuming forms of participation often advantage some groups over others. Where some citizens may have time to wait in long lines to vote, to volunteer for a campaign, to attend community board meetings, or to stay up to date on national, state, and local news, other citizens struggle to do the same. Since not all people have the time or inclination to devote substantial energy to politics, certain forms of participation exacerbate existing inequalities. Democracy for Busy People takes up the very real challenge of how to build a democracy that empowers people with limited time for politics. While many plans for democratic renewal emphasize demanding forms of political participation and daunting ideals of democratic citizenship, political theorist Kevin J. Elliott proposes a fundamentally different approach. He focuses instead on making democratic citizenship undemanding so that even busy people can be politically included. This approach emphasizes the core institutions of electoral democracy, such as political parties, against deliberative reforms and sortition. Timely and action-focused, Democracy for Busy People is necessary reading.
Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities: Who Wins and Who Loses When Schools Become Urban Amenities
by Maia Bloomfield CucchiaraDiscuss real estate with any young family and the subject of schools is certain to come up—in fact, it will likely be a crucial factor in determining where that family lives. Not merely institutions of learning, schools have increasingly become a sign of a neighborhood’s vitality, and city planners have ever more explicitly promoted “good schools” as a means of attracting more affluent families to urban areas, a dynamic process that Maia Bloomfield Cucchiara critically examines in Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities. Focusing on Philadelphia’s Center City Schools Initiative, she shows how education policy makes overt attempts to prevent, or at least slow, middle-class flight to the suburbs. Navigating complex ethical terrain, she balances the successes of such policies in strengthening urban schools and communities against the inherent social injustices they propagate—the further marginalization and disempowerment of lowerclass families. By asking what happens when affluent parents become “valued customers,” Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities uncovers a problematic relationship between public institutions and private markets, where the former are used to leverage the latter to effect urban transformations.
From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World
by Pamela H. SmithHow and why early modern European artisans began to record their knowledge. In From Lived Experience to the Written Word, Pamela H. Smith considers how and why, beginning in 1400 CE, European craftspeople began to write down their making practices. Rather than simply passing along knowledge in the workshop, these literate artisans chose to publish handbooks, guides, treatises, tip sheets, graphs, and recipe books, sparking early technical writing and laying the groundwork for how we think about scientific knowledge today. Focusing on metalworking from 1400–1800 CE, Smith looks at the nature of craft knowledge and skill, studying present-day and historical practices, objects, recipes, and artisanal manuals. From these sources, she considers how we can reconstruct centuries of largely lost knowledge. In doing so, she aims not only to unearth the techniques, material processes, and embodied experience of the past but also to gain insight into the lifeworld of artisans and their understandings of matter.
Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema (Cinema and Modernity)
by Ian ChristieThe early years of film were dominated by competition between inventors in America and France, especially Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers . But while these have generally been considered the foremost pioneers of film, they were not the only crucial figures in its inception. Telling the story of the white-hot years of filmmaking in the 1890s, Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema seeks to restore Robert Paul, Britain’s most important early innovator in film, to his rightful place. From improving upon Edison’s Kinetoscope to cocreating the first movie camera in Britain to building England’s first film studio and launching the country’s motion-picture industry, Paul played a key part in the history of cinema worldwide. It’s not only Paul’s story, however, that historian Ian Christie tells here. Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema also details the race among inventors to develop lucrative technologies and the jumbled culture of patent-snatching, showmanship, and music halls that prevailed in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Both an in-depth biography and a magnificent look at early cinema and fin-de-siècle Britain, Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema is a first-rate cultural history of a fascinating era of global invention, and the revelation of one of its undervalued contributors.
Air's Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660–1794
by Jayne Elizabeth LewisIn Air’s Appearance, Jayne Elizabeth Lewis enlists her readers in pursuit of the elusive concept of atmosphere in literary works. She shows how diverse conceptions of air in the eighteenth century converged in British fiction, producing the modern literary sense of atmosphere and moving novelists to explore the threshold between material and immaterial worlds. Air’s Appearance links the emergence of literary atmosphere to changing ideas about air and the earth’s atmosphere in natural philosophy, as well as to the era’s theories of the supernatural and fascination with social manners—or, as they are now known, “airs.” Lewis thus offers a striking new interpretation of several standard features of the Enlightenment—the scientific revolution, the decline of magic, character-based sociability, and the rise of the novel—that considers them in terms of the romance of air that permeates and connects them. As it explores key episodes in the history of natural philosophy and in major literary works like Paradise Lost, “The Rape of the Lock,” Robinson Crusoe, and The Mysteries of Udolpho, this book promises to change the atmosphere of eighteenth-century studies and the history of the novel.
The Abyss or Life Is Simple: Reading Knausgaard Writing Religion
by Courtney Bender Jeremy Biles Joshua Dubler Liane CarlsonAn absorbing collection of essays on religious textures in Knausgaard’s writings and our time.Min kamp, or My Struggle, is a six-volume novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard and one of the most significant literary works of the young twenty-first century. Published in Norwegian between 2009 and 2011, the novel presents an absorbing first-person narrative of the life of a writer with the same name as the author, in a world at once fully disillusioned and thoroughly enchanted. In 2015, a group of scholars began meeting to discuss the peculiarly religious qualities of My Struggle. Some were interested in Knausgaard’s attention to explicitly religious subjects and artworks, others to what they saw as more diffuse attention to the religiousness of contemporary life. The group wondered what reading these textures of religion in these volumes might say about our times, about writing, and about themselves. The Abyss or Life Is Simple is the culmination of this collective endeavor—a collection of interlocking essays on ritual, beauty, and the end of the world.
The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding
by Mark JohnsonIn The Meaning of the Body, Mark Johnson continues his pioneering work on the exciting connections between cognitive science, language, and meaning first begun in the classic Metaphors We Live By. Johnson uses recent research into infant psychology to show how the body generates meaning even before self-consciousness has fully developed. From there he turns to cognitive neuroscience to further explore the bodily origins of meaning, thought, and language and examines the many dimensions of meaning—including images, qualities, emotions, and metaphors—that are all rooted in the body’s physical encounters with the world. Drawing on the psychology of art and pragmatist philosophy, Johnson argues that all of these aspects of meaning-making are fundamentally aesthetic. He concludes that the arts are the culmination of human attempts to find meaning and that studying the aesthetic dimensions of our experience is crucial to unlocking meaning's bodily sources. Throughout, Johnson puts forth a bold new conception of the mind rooted in the understanding that philosophy will matter to nonphilosophers only if it is built on a visceral connection to the world. “Mark Johnson demonstrates that the aesthetic and emotional aspects of meaning are fundamental—central to conceptual meaning and reason, and that the arts show meaning-making in its fullest realization. If you were raised with the idea that art and emotion were external to ideas and reason, you must read this book. It grounds philosophy in our most visceral experience.”—George Lakoff, author of Moral Politics
Murder in New Orleans: The Creation of Jim Crow Policing (Historical Studies of Urban America)
by Jeffrey S. AlderNew Orleans in the 1920s and 1930s was a deadly place. In 1925, the city’s homicide rate was six times that of New York City and twelve times that of Boston. Jeffrey S. Adler has explored every homicide recorded in New Orleans between 1925 and 1940—over two thousand in all—scouring police and autopsy reports, old interviews, and crumbling newspapers. More than simply quantifying these cases, Adler places them in larger contexts—legal, political, cultural, and demographic—and emerges with a tale of racism, urban violence, and vicious policing that has startling relevance for today.Murder in New Orleans shows that whites were convicted of homicide at far higher rates than blacks leading up to the mid-1920s. But by the end of the following decade, this pattern had reversed completely, despite an overall drop in municipal crime rates. The injustice of this sharp rise in arrests was compounded by increasingly brutal treatment of black subjects by the New Orleans police department. Adler explores other counterintuitive trends in violence, particularly how murder soared during the flush times of the Roaring Twenties, how it plummeted during the Great Depression, and how the vicious response to African American crime occurred even as such violence plunged in frequency—revealing that the city’s cycle of racial policing and punishment was connected less to actual patterns of wrongdoing than to the national enshrinement of Jim Crow. Rather than some hyperviolent outlier, this Louisiana city was a harbinger of the endemic racism at the center of today’s criminal justice state. Murder in New Orleans lays bare how decades-old crimes, and the racially motivated cruelty of the official response, have baleful resonance in the age of Black Lives Matter.
Working the Difference: Science, Spirit, and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing
by E. Summerson CarrA history of motivational interviewing and what its rise reveals about how cultural forms emerge and spread. Motivational interviewing (MI) is a professional practice, a behavioral therapy, and a self-professed conversation style that encourages clients to talk themselves into change. Originally developed to treat alcoholics, MI quickly spread into a variety of professional fields including corrections, medicine, and sanitation. In Working the Difference, E. Summerson Carr focuses on the training and dissemination of MI to explore how cultural forms—and particularly forms of expertise—emerge and spread. The result is a compelling analysis of the American preoccupations at MI’s core, from democratic autonomy and freedom of speech to Protestant ethics and American pragmatism.
Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry
by Albert BorgmannBlending social analysis and philosophy, Albert Borgmann maintains that technology creates a controlling pattern in our lives. This pattern, discernible even in such an inconspicuous action as switching on a stereo, has global effects: it sharply divides life into labor and leisure, it sustains the industrial democracies, and it fosters the view that the earth itself is a technological device. He argues that technology has served us as well in conquering hunger and disease, but that when we turn to it for richer experiences, it leads instead to a life dominated by effortless and thoughtless consumption. Borgmann does not reject technology but calls for public conversation about the nature of the good life. He counsels us to make room in a technological age for matters of ultimate concern—things and practices that engage us in their own right.
The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay of Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East
by Henri Frankfort Thorkild Jacobsen William A. Irwin H.A. FrankfortThe people in ancient times the phenomenal world was teeming with life; the thunderclap, the sudden shadow, the unknown and eerie clearing in the wood, all were living things. This unabridged edition traces the fascinating history of thought from the pre-scientific, personal concept of a "humanized" world to the achievement of detached intellectual reasoning. The authors describe and analyze the spiritual life of three ancient civilizations: the Egyptians, whose thinking was profoundly influenced by the daily rebirth of the sun and the annual rebirth of the Nile; the Mesopotamians, who believed the stars, moon, and stones were all citizens of a cosmic state; and the Hebrews, who transcended prevailing mythopoeic thought with their cosmogony of the will of God. In the concluding chapter the Frankforts show that the Greeks, with their intellectual courage, were the first culture to discover a realm of speculative thought in which myth was overcome.
Sound Experiments: The Music of the AACM
by Paul SteinbeckA groundbreaking study of the trailblazing music of Chicago’s AACM, a leader in the world of jazz and experimental music. Founded on Chicago’s South Side in 1965 and still thriving today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is the most influential collective organization in jazz and experimental music. In Sound Experiments, Paul Steinbeck offers an in-depth historical and musical investigation of the collective, analyzing individual performances and formal innovations in captivating detail. He pays particular attention to compositions by Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell, the Association’s leading figures, as well as Anthony Braxton, George Lewis (and his famous computer-music experiment, Voyager), Wadada Leo Smith, and Henry Threadgill, along with younger AACM members such as Mike Reed, Tomeka Reid, and Nicole Mitchell. Sound Experiments represents a sonic history, spanning six decades, that affords insight not only into the individuals who created this music but also into an astonishing collective aesthetic. This aesthetic was uniquely grounded in nurturing communal ties across generations, as well as a commitment to experimentalism. The AACM’s compositions broke down the barriers between jazz and experimental music and made essential contributions to African American expression more broadly. Steinbeck shows how the creators of these extraordinary pieces pioneered novel approaches to instrumentation, notation, conducting, musical form, and technology, creating new soundscapes in contemporary music.
American Sunshine: Diseases of Darkness and the Quest for Natural Light
by Daniel FreundIn the second half of the nineteenth century, American cities began to go dark. Hulking new buildings overspread blocks, pollution obscured the skies, and glass and smog screened out the health-giving rays of the sun. Doctors fed anxities about these new conditions with claims about a rising tide of the "diseases of darkness," especially rickets and tuberculosis. In American Sunshine, Daniel Freund tracks the obsession with sunlight from those bleak days into the twentieth century. Before long, social reformers, medical professionals, scientists, and a growing nudist movement proffered remedies for America’s new dark age. Architects, city planners, and politicians made access to sunlight central to public housing and public health. and entrepreneurs, dairymen, and tourism boosters transformed the pursuit of sunlight and its effects into a commodity. Within this historical context, Freund sheds light on important questions about the commodification of health and nature and makes an original contribution to the histories of cities, consumerism, the environment, and medicine.
Murder in Canton: A Judge Dee Mystery (The Judge Dee Mysteries)
by Robert van GulikBrought back into print in the 1990s to wide acclaim, re-designed new editions of Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee Mysteries are now available. Written by a Dutch diplomat and scholar during the 1950s and 1960s, these lively and historically accurate mysteries have entertained a devoted following for decades. Set during the T'ang dynasty, they feature Judge Dee, a brilliant and cultured Confucian magistrate disdainful of personal luxury and corruption, who cleverly selects allies to help him navigate the royal courts, politics, and ethnic tensions in imperial China. Robert van Gulik modeled Judge Dee on a magistrate of that name who lived in the seventh century, and he drew on stories and literary conventions of Chinese mystery writing dating back to the Sung dynasty to construct his ingenious plots.Murder in Canton takes place in the year 680, as Judge Dee, recently promoted to lord chief justice, is sent incognito to Canton to investigate the disappearance of a court censor. With the help of his trusted lieutenants Chiao Tai and Tao Gan, and that of a clever blind girl who collects crickets, Dee solves a complex puzzle of political intrigue and murder through the three separate subplots "the vanished censor," "the Smaragdine dancer," and "the Golden Bell." An expert on the art and erotica as well as the literature, religion, and politics of China, van Gulik also provides charming illustrations to accompany his engaging and entertaining mysteries.
Culture & Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu
by David SwartzPierre Bourdieu is one of the world's most important social theorists and is also one of the great empirical researchers in contemporary sociology. However, reading Bourdieu can be difficult for those not familiar with the French cultural context, and until now a comprehensive introduction to Bourdieu's oeuvre has not been available. David Swartz focuses on a central theme in Bourdieu's work—the complex relationship between culture and power—and explains that sociology for Bourdieu is a mode of political intervention. Swartz clarifies Bourdieu's difficult concepts, noting where they have been misinterpreted by critics and where they have fallen short in resolving important analytical issues. The book also shows how Bourdieu has synthesized his theory of practices and symbolic power from Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, and how his work was influenced by Sartre, Levi-Strauss, and Althusser.Culture and Power is the first book to offer both a sympathetic and critical examination of Bourdieu's work and it will be invaluable to social scientists as well as to a broader audience in the humanities.
Staying On: A Novel (Phoenix Fiction Ser.)
by Paul ScottIn this sequel to The Raj Quartet, Colonel Tusker and Lucy Smalley stay on in the hills of Pankot after Indian independence deprives them of their colonial status. Finally fed up with accommodating her husband, Lucy claims a degree of independence herself. Eloquent and hilarious, she and Tusker act out class tensions among the British of the Raj and give voice to the loneliness, rage, and stubborn affection in their marriage. Staying On won the Booker Prize in 1977 and was made into a motion picture starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in 1979. "Staying On far transcends the events of its central action. . . . [The work] should help win for Scott . . . the reputation he deserves—as one of the best novelists to emerge from Britain's silver age."—Robert Towers, Newsweek "Scott's vision is both precise and painterly. Like an engraver cross-hatching in the illusion of fullness, he selects nuances that will make his characters take on depth and poignancy."—Jean G. Zorn, New York Times Book Review "A graceful comic coda to the earlier song of India. . . . No one writing knows or can evoke an Anglo-Indian setting better than Scott."—Paul Gray, Time "Staying On provides a sort of postscript to [Scott's] deservedly acclaimed The Raj Quartet. . . . He has, as it were, summoned up the Raj's ghost in Staying On. . . . It is the story of the living death, in retirement, and the final end of a walk-on character from the quartet. . . . Scott has completed the task of covering in the form of a fictional narrative the events leading up to India's partition and the achievement of independence in 1947. It is, on any showing, a creditable achievement."—Malcolm Muggeridge, New York Times Book Review
Liberalism's Last Man: Hayek in the Age of Political Capitalism
by Vikash YadavA modern reframing of Friedrich Hayek’s most famous work for the 21st century.Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom was both an intellectual milestone and a source of political division, spurring fiery debates around capitalism and its discontents. In the ensuing discord, Hayek’s true message was lost: liberalism is a thing to be protected above all else, and its alternatives are perilous.In Liberalism’s Last Man, Vikash Yadav revives the core of Hayek’s famed work to map today’s primary political anxiety: the tenuous state of liberal meritocratic capitalism—particularly in North America, Europe, and Asia—in the face of strengthening political-capitalist powers like China, Vietnam, and Singapore. As open societies struggle to match the economic productivity of authoritarian-capitalist economies, the promises of a meritocracy fade; Yadav channels Hayek to articulate how liberalism’s moral backbone is its greatest defense against repressive social structures.