Best of
Sociology

2005

Black Rednecks and White Liberals


Thomas Sowell - 2005
    As late as the 1940s and 1950s, he argues, poor Southern rednecks were regarded by Northern employers and law enforcement officials as lazy, lawless, and sexually immoral. This pattern was repeated by blacks with whom they shared a subculture in the South. Over the last half century poor whites and most blacks have moved up in class and affluence, but the ghetto remains filled with black rednecks. Their attempt to escape, Sowell shows, is hampered by their white liberal friends who turn dysfunctional black redneck culture into a sacrosanct symbol of racial identity. In addition to Black Rednecks and White Liberals, the book takes on subjects ranging from Are Jews Generic? to The Real History of Slavery.

Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing


Joy DeGruy - 2005
    Slavery produced centuries of physical, psychological and spiritual injury. Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing lays the groundwork for understanding how the past has influenced the present, and opens up the discussion of how we can use the strengths we have gained to heal.

Hungry Planet


Peter Menzel - 2005
    In the USA, the Ronayne-Caven family enjoys corndogs-on-a-stick with a tossed green salad. This age-old practice of sitting down to a family meal is undergoing unprecedented change as rising world affluence and trade, along with the spread of global food conglomerates, transform diets worldwide. In HUNGRY PLANET, the creative team behind the best-selling Material World, Women in the Material World, and MAN EATING BUGS presents a photographic study of families from around the world, revealing what people eat during the course of one week. Each family's profile includes a detailed description.       Awards2006 James Beard Cookbook of the Year The Splendid Table Book of the Year2005 Harry Chapin Media Award finalist for the 2006 IACP Cookbook Award Reviews"Arresting, beautiful, enlightening and infinitely human, this is a collection of full-page photos of families around the world surrounded by what they eat in a single week -- from Bhutan to San Antonio. Read the illuminating statistics and the essays. This is a book for the family and for the classroom. You won't see the same old "aren't we better than them" attitude, nor will you be shamed. This book reminds us that what we eat is the simplest, yet most profound, thread that ties us together."—Lynne Rossetto Kasper, Host of American Public Media's Public Radio Program, The Splendid Table“the politics of food at its most poignant and provocative. A coffee table book that will certainly make coffee interesting.”—Washington Post“While the photos are extraordinary--fine enough for a stand-alone volume--it's the questions these photos ask that make this volume so gripping. This is a beautiful, quietly provocative volume.”—Publishers Weekly, *Starred Review*“This book of portraits reveals a planet of joyful individuality, dispiriting sameness, and heart-breaking disparity. It's a perfect gift for the budding anti-globalists on your list”—Bon Appetit “[A] unique photographic study of global nutrition”        —USA Today “Grabs your attention for the startlingly varied stories it tells about how people feed themselves around the world. Its contents are based on detailed research, beautifully photographed, presented with often disturbing clarity.”                                                     —Associated Press "The world's kitchens open to Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio, the intrepid couple who created the series of books called Material World.... As always with this couple's terse, lively travelogues, politics and the world economy are never far from view."                                 —New York Times Book Review  “illuminating, thought-provoking, and gloriously colorful”                                                  —Saveur Magazine “Richly colored and quietly composed photographs....Hungry Planet is not a book about obesity or corporate villains; it's something much grander. Its premise is simple to the point of obvious and powerful to the point of art.”                                                                     —Salon.com “A fascinating nutritional and gustatory tour.”                                                                —San Jose Mercury News“A grand culinary voyage through our modern world...a lushly illustrated anthropological study.”                                                                                                                 —San Francisco Bay Guardian“The talked-about book of the season...the stories are fascinating.”                                    —Detroit Free Press“Unique and engaging”                                                                                              —Delta Airlines Sky magazine

Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide


Andrea Lee Smith - 2005
    In Conquest, Smith places Native American women at the center of her analysis of sexual violence, challenging both conventional definitions of the term and conventional responses to the problem.Beginning with the impact of the abuses inflicted on Native American children at state-sanctioned boarding schools from the 1880s to the 1980s, Smith adroitly expands our conception of violence to include environmental racism, population control and the widespread appropriation of Indian cultural practices by whites and other non-natives. Smith deftly connects these and other examples of historical and contemporary colonialism to the high rates of violence against Native American women—the most likely women in the United States to die of poverty-related illnesses, be victims of rape and suffer partner abuse.Essential reading for scholars and activists, Conquest is the powerful synthesis of Andrea Smith’s intellectual and political work to date. By focusing on the impact of sexual violence on Native American women, Smith articulates an agenda that is compelling to feminists, Native Americans, other people of color and all who are committed to creating viable alternatives to state-based “solutions.”

Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism


James W. Loewen - 2005
    Loewen, exposes the secret communities and hotbeds of racial injustice that sprung up throughout the twentieth century unnoticed, forcing us to reexamine race relations in the United States.In this groundbreaking work, bestselling sociologist James W. Loewen, author of the national bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, brings to light decades of hidden racial exclusion in America. In a provocative, sweeping analysis of American residential patterns, Loewen uncovers the thousands of “sundown towns”—almost exclusively white towns where it was an unspoken rule that blacks could not live there—that cropped up throughout the twentieth century, most of them located outside of the South. These towns used everything from legal formalities to violence to create homogenous Caucasian communities—and their existence has gone unexamined until now. For the first time, Loewen takes a long, hard look at the history, sociology, and continued existence of these towns, contributing an essential new chapter to the study of American race relations.Sundown Towns combines personal narrative, history, and analysis to create a readable picture of this previously unknown American institution all written with Loewen’s trademark honesty and thoroughness.

The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America


Jonathan Kozol - 2005
    Board of Education, segregation of black children has reverted to its highest level since 1968. In many inner-city schools, a stick-and-carrot method of behavioral control traditionally used in prisons is now used with students. Meanwhile, as high-stakes testing takes on pathological and punitive dimensions, liberal education has been increasingly replaced by culturally barren and robotic methods of instruction that would be rejected out of hand by schools that serve the mainstream of society.Filled with the passionate voices of children, principals, and teachers, and some of the most revered leaders in the black community, The Shame of the Nation pays tribute to those undefeated educators who persist against the odds, but directly challenges the chilling practices now being forced upon our urban systems. In their place, Kozol offers a humane, dramatic challenge to our nation to fulfill at last the promise made some 50 years ago to all our youngest citizens.

A Brief History of Neoliberalism


David Harvey - 2005
    Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. Through critical engagement with this history, he constructs a framework, not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.

Last Chance in Texas: The Redemption of Criminal Youth


John Hubner - 2005
    How was it possible, he wondered, that a state like Texas, famed for its hardcore attitude toward crime and punishment, could be leading the way in the rehabilitation of violent and troubled youth? Now Hubner shares the surprising answers he found over months of unprecedented access to the Giddings State School, home to “the worst of the worst”: four hundred teenage lawbreakers convicted of crimes ranging from aggravated assault to murder. Hubner follows two of these youths–a boy and a girl–through harrowing group therapy sessions in which they, along with their fellow inmates, recount their crimes and the abuse they suffered as children. The key moment comes when the young offenders reenact these soul-shattering moments with other group members in cathartic outpourings of suffering and anger that lead, incredibly, to genuine remorse and the beginnings of true empathy . . . the first steps on the long road to redemption.Cutting through the political platitudes surrounding the controversial issue of juvenile justice, Hubner lays bare the complex ties between abuse and violence. By turns wrenching and uplifting, Last Chance in Texas tells a profoundly moving story about the children who grow up to inflict on others the violence that they themselves have suffered. It is a story of horror and heartbreak, yet ultimately full of hope.

When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America


Ira Katznelson - 2005
    Through mechanisms designed by Southern Democrats that specifically excluded maids and farm workers, the gap between blacks and whites actually widened despite postwar prosperity. In the words of noted historian Eric Foner, "Katznelson's incisive book should change the terms of debate about affirmative action, and about the last seventy years of American history."

The Hidden Wound


Wendell Berry - 2005
    Available for the first time in paperback.

Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses


Theodore Dalrymple - 2005
    In these twenty-six pieces, Dr. Dalrymple ranges over literature and ideas, from Shakespeare to Marx, from the break-down of Islam to the legalization of drugs. The book includes "When Islam Breaks Down," named by David Brooks of the New York Times as the best journal article of 2004.Informed by years of medical practice in a wide variety of settings, Dr. Dalrymple's acquaintance with the outer limits of human experience allows him to discover the universal in the local and the particular, and makes him impatient with the humbug and obscurantism that have too long marred our social and political discourse.His essays are incisive yet undogmatic, beautifully composed and devoid of disfiguring jargon. Our Culture, What's Left of It is a book that restores our faith in the central importance of literature and criticism to our civilization.

Behind Closed Doors: A True Story of Abuse, Neglect and Survival Against the Odds


Jenny Tomlin - 2005
    In 'Behind Closed Doors' Jenny Tomlin recounts her traumatic upbringing at the hands of a physically and sexually abusive father, as well as how she and her siblings not only survived but eventually transcended their experiences, and how she went on to find love and happiness in her life.

Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference


Cordelia Fine - 2005
    Even though the glass ceiling is cracked, most women stay comfortably beneath it, and everywhere we hear about vitally important “hardwired” differences between male and female brains. The neuroscience we read about in magazines, newspaper articles, books, and sometimes even scientific journals increasingly tells a tale of two brains, and the result is more often than not a validation of the status quo. Women, it seems, are just too intuitive for math, men too focused for housework.Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology, Cordelia Fine debunks the myth of hardwired differences between men’s and women’s brains, unraveling the evidence behind such claims as men’s brains aren’t wired for empathy, and women’s brains aren’t made to fix cars. She then goes one step further, offering a very different explanation of the dissimilarities between men’s and women’s behavior. Instead of a “male brain” and a “female brain,” Fine gives us a glimpse of plastic, mutable minds that are continuously influenced by cultural assumptions about gender.Delusions of Gender provides us with a much-needed corrective to the belief that men’s and women’s brains are intrinsically different--a belief that, as Fine shows with insight and humor--all too often works to the detriment of ourselves and our society.

Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated


Dave Eggers - 2005
    They were wrongfully convicted because of problems that plague many criminal proceedings: inept defense lawyers, overzealous prosecutors, deceitful and coercive interrogation tactics, bad science, snitches, and eyewitness misidentification. The lives of these victims of the U.S. criminal justice system were effectively wrecked. Finally free, usually after more than a decade of incarceration, they re-enter society with nothing but the scars from a harrowing descent into prison only to struggle to survive on the outside.The thirteen men and women portrayed here, and the hundreds of others who have been exonerated, are the tip of the iceberg. There are countless others (thousands by all estimates) who are in prison today for crimes they did not commit. These are the stories of some of the wrongfully convicted, who have managed, often by sheer luck, to prove their innocence. Their stories are spellbinding, heartbreaking, unimaginable, and ultimately inspiring. After reading these deeply personal accounts, you will never look at the criminal justice system the same way. (from the publisher's website)

War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires


Peter Turchin - 2005
    Turchin argues that the key to the formation of an empire is a society’s capacity for collective action. He demonstrates that high levels of cooperation are found where people have to band together to fight off a common enemy, and that this kind of cooperation led to the formation of the Roman and Russian empires, and the United States. But as empires grow, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, conflict replaces cooperation, and dissolution inevitably follows. Eloquently argued and rich with historical examples, War and Peace and War offers a bold new theory about the course of world history.

Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation


Alexei Yurchak - 2005
    To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of “late socialism” (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.Focusing on the major transformation of the 1950s at the level of discourse, ideology, language, and ritual, Alexei Yurchak traces the emergence of multiple unanticipated meanings, communities, relations, ideals, and pursuits that this transformation subsequently enabled. His historical, anthropological, and linguistic analysis draws on rich ethnographic material from Late Socialism and the post-Soviet period.The model of Soviet socialism that emerges provides an alternative to binary accounts that describe that system as a dichotomy of official culture and unofficial culture, the state and the people, public self and private self, truth and lie — and ignore the crucial fact that, for many Soviet citizens, the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialism were genuinely important, although they routinely transgressed and reinterpreted the norms and rules of the socialist state.

Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity


Hartmut Rosa - 2005
    He identifies three categories of change in the tempo of modern social life: technological acceleration, evident in transportation, communication, and production; the acceleration of social change, reflected in cultural knowledge, social institutions, and personal relationships; and acceleration in the pace of life, which happens despite the expectation that technological change should increase an individual's free time.According to Rosa, both the structural and cultural aspects of our institutions and practices are marked by the "shrinking of the present," a decreasing time period during which expectations based on past experience reliably match the future. When this phenomenon combines with technological acceleration and the increasing pace of life, time seems to flow ever faster, making our relationships to each other and the world fluid and problematic. It is as if we are standing on "slipping slopes," a steep social terrain that is itself in motion and in turn demands faster lives and technology. As Rosa deftly shows, this self-reinforcing feedback loop fundamentally determines the character of modern life.

The Little Prisoner


Jane Elliott - 2005
    She became the helpless victim of a sociopath—bullied, dominated, and sexually abused by a man only fourteen years her senior: her stepfather. For nearly two decades she was held prisoner, both physically and emotionally. But at the age of twenty-one she escaped . . . and then she fought back.The Little Prisoner is the shocking, astonishing, and ultimately uplifting true story of one woman's shattering twenty-year ordeal—and how she triumphed against an evil and violent human monster when honesty and bravery were her only weapons.

Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity


Afsaneh Najmabadi - 2005
    Peeling away notions of a rigid pre-modern Islamic gender system, Afsaneh Najmabadi provides a compelling demonstration of the centrality of gender and sexuality to the shaping of modern culture and politics in Iran and of how changes in ideas about gender and sexuality affected conceptions of beauty, love, homeland, marriage, education, and citizenship. She concludes with a provocative discussion of Iranian feminism and its role in that country's current culture wars. In addition to providing an important new perspective on Iranian history, Najmabadi skillfully demonstrates how using gender as an analytic category can provide insight into structures of hierarchy and power and thus into the organization of politics and social life.

Access All Areas: A User's Guide to the Art of Urban Exploration


Ninjalicious - 2005
    Through chapters on topics like sneaking around, equipping and training, readers will learn the basics of the hobby, as well as about the most popular sites for urban exploration, such as abandoned buildings, construction sites, storm drains and utility tunnels. Always an adventurer, Toronto author Ninjalicious began his intensive, thoroughly documented approach to exploration during a lengthy hospital stay, when boredom motivated him to explore the beautiful old building’s every nook and cranny. He began publishing the zine Infiltration in 1996, in conjunction with the website infiltration.org, which, with nearly 2,000 visitors a day, is widely considered to be an authoritative source on the hobby of urban exploration. Ninjalicious completed Access All Areas shortly before his untimely death from cancer in summer 2005. Copies are available for online purchase at www.infilpress.com

The Little Hero—One Boy's Fight for Freedom: Iqbal Masih's Story


Andrew Crofts - 2005
    Iqbal Masih was murdered at the age of thirteen, but not before becoming an internationally renowned opponent of child and slave labor. Forced into servitude at a carpet factory in order to pay a family debt, Iqbal, a Pakistani, experienced firsthand the cruelty of an economic system which decimates local communities on one end and spits out consumer products on the other. Mustering the courage to escape the factory, Iqbal found the Bonded Labor Liberation Front and worked to instigate a children's rebellion against companies using child slavery. Rewarding Iqbal for his work, Reebok presented him with the Youth in Action Award in 1995 and offered him a full scholarship to study law at Brandeis University—a scholarship he did not live to accept.

The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter


Juanita Brown - 2005
    Based on living systems thinking, this innovative approach creates dynamic networks of conversation that can catalyze an organization or community's own collective intelligence around its most important questions. Filled with stories of actual Cafe dialogues in business, education, government, and community organizations across the globe, this uniquely crafted book demonstrates how the World Cafe can be adapted to any setting or culture. Examples from such varied organizations as Hewlett-Packard, American Society for Quality, the nation of Singapore, the University of Texas, and many others, demonstrate the process in action. Along with its seven core design principles, The World Cafe offers practical tips for hosting "conversations that matter" in groups of any size- strengthening both personal relationships and people's capacity to shape the future together.

Hotel Rwanda: Bringing The True Story Of An African Hero To Film


Terry George - 2005
    His real-life story inspired the Oscar®-nominated writer of In the Name of the Father, Terry George, to make the extraordinary film, Hotel Rwanda, starring Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo, Joaquin Phoenix, and Nick Nolte, which has received accolades from critics and moviegoers alike, winning numerous awards.Now, in the only official companion book, comes the fascinating filmmaking story, with first-person pieces by Terry George and co-screenwriter Keir Pearson about their three-year struggle to gain support and financing, as well as a brief history of Rwanda with details on the actual events portrayed in the movie.Illustrated with more than 70 historical and contemporary photos and movie stills, the book also includes journalist Nicola Graydon's report on joining Paul Rusesabagina when he first returned to Rwanda on the tenth anniversary of the genocide; writer Anne Thompson's personal journal of her visit to the set in Africa during production in February 2004; and a compelling transcript of the PBS Frontline documentary revealing the afterthoughts of officials who chose not to listen to the cries for help. In addition there is a timeline of the crisis, a further reading and viewing list, and the complete screenplay.

The Knitter's Handbook: Essential Skills & Helpful Hints from Knitter's Magazine


Elaine Rowley - 2005
    From casting on the first stitch to fancy stitch maneuvers, a range of key expertises are discussed with pointers that will help knitters prevent problems, fix mistakes, and create flawless projects. Updated information on industry standards in yarn weights, fit and sizing, and skill levels are provided.

The End Of Words: The Language Of Reconciliation In A Culture Of Violence


Richard Lischer - 2005
    Mass communication keeps our thinking and talking at a flat mediocrity; mass violence gives the lie to sacred speech. "The End of Words" opens a path from languagebs disappointments and dead ends to its true end. Here Lischer shows how faithful reading of Scripture prepares the way for effective preaching, and he challenges conventional storytelling with a deeper and more biblical view of narrative preaching. The ultimate purpose of preaching, Lischer argues, is to bring about Godbs reconciliation in the world.

Child Abuse and Neglect: Attachment, Development and Intervention


David Howe - 2005
    Using research evidence, this clear, compelling textbook answers the key questions any student or specialist in child welfare would ask.

Cowboy Ethics


James P. Owen - 2005
    Owen shares his new perspective on Wall Street and how the Code of the West can and should be applied to business practices and the corporate world. The book is beautifully illustrated with David Stoecklein's western photography

The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege


Robert Jensen - 2005
    DuBois wrote that the question whites wanted to ask him was: “How does it feel to be a problem?” In The Heart of Whiteness, Robert Jensen writes that it is time for white people in America to self-consciously reverse the direction of that question and to fully acknowledge that in the racial arena, they are the problem.While some whites would like to think that we have reached “the end of racism” in the United States, and others would like to celebrate diversity but are oblivious to the political, economic, and social consequences of a nation—and their sense of self—founded on a system of white supremacy, Jensen proposes a different approach. He sets his sights not only on the racism that can’t be hidden, but also on the liberal platitudes that sometimes conceal the depths of that racism in “polite society.”The Heart of Whiteness offers an honest and rigorous exploration of what Jensen refers to as the depraved nature of whiteness in the United States. Mixing personal experience with data and theory, he faces down the difficult realities of -racism and white privilege. He argues that any system that denies non-whites their full humanity also keeps whites from fully accessing their own.This book is both a cautionary tale for those who believe that they have transcended racism, and also an expression of the hope for genuine transcendence. When white people fully understand and accept the painful reality that they are indeed “the problem,” it should lead toward serious attempts to change one’s own life and join with others to change society.Robert Jensen is the author of Citizens of the Empire. He is a professor of media ethics and journalism at The University of Texas at Austin.

Encountering the World of Islam


Keith E. Swartley - 2005
    Through this comprehensive collection, you will learn about Muhammad and the history of Islam, gain insight into today's conflicts, and dispel western fears and myths. You will also discover the frustrations and desires of Muslims and learn how to pray for and befriend them. Encountering the World of Islam provides a positive, balanced, and biblical perspective on God's heart for Muslims and equips you to reach out to them in Christ's love.Encountering the World of Islam features articles from eighty authors who have lived throughout the Muslim world, from West Africa to Southeast Asia. Experienced missionaries, scholars of Islam, and other wellknown authors, including several Muslims, contribute to this extensive ministry resource.

The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton


Jerome Karabel - 2005
    Full of colorful characters (including Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, James Bryant Conant, and Kingman Brewster), it shows how the ferocious battles over admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton shaped the American elite and bequeathed to us the peculiar system of college admissions that we have today. From the bitter anti-Semitism of the 1920s to the rise of the “meritocracy" at midcentury to the debate over affirmative action today, Jerome Karabel sheds surprising new light on the main events and social movements of the twentieth century. No one who reads this remarkable book will ever think about college admissions -- or America -- in the same way again.

Proceed and Be Bold: Rural Studio After Samuel Mockbee


Andrea Oppenheimer Dean - 2005
    Choosing impoverished Hale County, Alabama, for his bold experiment, Mockbee and his Auburn University students peppered this left-behind corner of the rural South with striking buildings ofexceptional design. Most use recycled and curious materials: hay bales, surplus tires, leftover carpet tiles, even discarded 1980 Chevy Caprice windshields. The publication of Rural Studio brought this innovative work to the public, andfive printings latercontinues to affect the way people view architecture.Since Mockbee's death in 2001, the Rural Studio has continued to thrive, a tribute to its founder's vision. In 2004, the American Institute of Architects posthumously awarded Mockbee its highest honor, the Gold Medal for Architecture. Under Mockbee's successor, Andrew Freear, the studio has seeded southwest Alabama with an additional seventeen architectural landmarks, and all are shown here. With thoughtful text from Andrea Oppenheimer Dean and stunning photographs by Timothy Hursley, thisnew book explains the changes the studio has undergone during the last four years and its continuing ability to "proceed and be bold," as Mockbee counseled.

Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees


Caroline Moorehead - 2005
    Moorehead's experience living and working with refugees puts a human face on the news, providing unforgettable portraits of the refugees she meets in Cairo, Guinea, Sicily, Lebanon, England, Australia, Finland, and at the U.S.-Mexico border. Human Cargo changes our understanding of what it means to have and lose a place in the world, and reveals how the refugee "problem" is on a par with global crises such as terrorism and world hunger.

Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage


Kathryn J. Edin - 2005
    Now 27, she is the unmarried mother of three and is raising her kids in one of Philadelphia's poorest neighborhoods. Would she and her children be better off if she had waited to have them and had married their father first? Why do so many poor American youth like Millie continue to have children before they can afford to take care of them? Over a span of five years, sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas talked in-depth with 162 low-income single moms like Millie to learn how they think about marriage and family. Promises I Can Keep offers an intimate look at what marriage and motherhood mean to these women and provides the most extensive on-the-ground study to date of why they put children before marriage despite the daunting challenges they know lie ahead.Read an excerpt here: Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage, With a New Prefaceby Kathryn Edin and M... by University of California Press

Edward S. Curtis: The Women


Christopher Cardozo - 2005
    Curtis' stunning, evocative and hugely popular portraits of Native American Women--with never-before-published images.

Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West


Sheila Jeffreys - 2005
    However, in the last two decades the brutality of western beauty practices seems to have become much more severe, requiring the breaking of skin, spilling of blood and rearrangement or amputation of body parts. Beauty and Misogyny seeks to make sense of why beauty practices are not only just as persistent, but in many ways more extreme. It examines the pervasive use of makeup, the misogyny of fashion and high-heeled shoes, and looks at the role of pornography in the creation of increasingly popular beauty practices such as breast implants, genital waxing and surgical alteration of the labia. It looks at the cosmetic surgery and body piercing/cutting industries as being forms of self-mutilation by proxy, in which the surgeons and piercers serve as proxies to harm women s bodies, and concludes by considering how a culture of resistance to these practices can be created.This essential work will appeal to students and teachers of feminist psychology, gender studies, cultural studies, and feminist sociology at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and to anyone with an interest in feminism, women and beauty, and women s health.

Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy


Bruno Latour - 2005
    In a time of political turmoil and anticlimax, this book redefines politics as operating in the realm of "things." Politics is not just an arena, a profession, or a system, but a concern for things brought to the attention of the fluid and expansive constituency of the public. But how are things made public? What, we might ask, is a republic, a "res publica," a public thing, if we do not know how to make things public? There are many other kinds of assemblies, which are not political in the usual sense, that gather a public around things--scientific laboratories, supermarkets, churches, and disputes involving natural resources like rivers, landscapes, and air. The authors of "Making Things Public"--and the ZKM show that the book accompanies--ask what would happen if politics revolved around disputed things. Instead of looking for democracy only in the official sphere of professional politics, they examine the new atmospheric conditions--technologies, interfaces, platforms, networks, and mediations that allow things to be made public. They show us that the old definition of politics is too narrow; there are many techniques of representation--in politics, science, and art--of which Parliaments and Congresses are only a part.The authors include such prominent thinkers as Richard Rorty, Simon Schaffer, Peter Galison, Richard Powers, Lorraine Daston, Richard Aczel, and Donna Haraway; their writings are accompanied by excerpts from John Dewey, Shakespeare, Swift, La Fontaine, and Melville. More than 500 color images document the new idea of what Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel call an "object-oriented democracy."

Introduction to Systems Theory


Niklas Luhmann - 2005
    Through his many books he developed a highly original form of systems theory that has been hugely influential in a wide variety of disciplines.In Introduction to Systems Theory, Luhmann explains the key ideas of general and sociological systems theory and supplies a wealth of examples to illustrate his approach. The book offers a wide range of concepts and theorems that can be applied to politics and the economy, religion and science, art and education, organization and the family. Moreover, Luhmann's ideas address important contemporary issues in such diverse fields as cognitive science, ecology, and the study of social movements.This book provides all the necessary resources for readers to work through the foundations of systems theory - no other work by Luhmann is as clear and accessible as this. There is also much here that will be of great interest to more advanced scholars and practitioners in sociology and the social sciences.

Oxford Dictionary of Sociology


John P. Scott - 2005
    Compiled by a team of sociology experts, it is packed with over 2,500 entries. Each entry is elaborated with a clear description and in-depth analysis, and real-life examples are given wherever possible. Coverage is extensive, and includes terms from the related fields of psychology, economics, anthropology, philosophy, and political science. This new edition, edited by Professor John Scott, has been revised to bring the dictionary completely up to date while retaining the concise, clear editorial quality of the previous editions. New features include boxed-in entries covering key aspects of sociology and weblinks to quality sociological websites. Seventy new entries cover everything from adaptation to orientalism. This edition also contains a range of new biographies covering key figures, such as Gilles Deleuze and Erich Fromm. It is both an invaluable introduction to sociology for beginners and a useful aid for more advanced students and teachers.

The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research


Norman K. Denzin - 2005
    Built on the foundations of the landmark First and Second Editions (1994, 2000), the Third Edition moves qualitative research boldly into the 21st century. The editors and authors ask how the practices of qualitative inquiry can be used to address issues of social justice in this new century.

All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated


Nell Bernstein - 2005
    One in thirty-three American children goes to sleep without access to a parent because that parent is in jail. Despite these staggering numbers, the children of prisoners remain largely invisible to society. Following in the tradition of the bestseller Random Family, journalist Nell Bernstein shows, through the deeply moving stories of real families, how the children of the incarcerated are routinely punished for their parents' status; ignored, neglected, stigmatized, and endangered, with minimal effort made to help them cope. Topics range from children's experiences at the time of their parent's arrest, to laws and politics that force even low-level offenders to forfeit their parental rights, to alternative sanctions that take into account prisoners' status as mothers and fathers. All Alone in the World defines a crucial aspect of criminal justice and, in doing so, illuminates a critical new realm of human rights.

Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Fighting the Indian Caste System


Christophe Jaffrelot - 2005
    Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956) rose from a community of "untouchables," to become a major figure in modern Indian history. Christophe Jaffrelot's biography reconsiders Dr. Ambedkar's life and thought and his unique combination of pragmatism and idealism. Establishing himself as a scholar, activist, journalist, and educator, Ambedkar ultimately found himself immersed in Indian politics and helped to draft the nation's constitution as law minister in Nehru's first cabinet. Ambedkar's ideas remain an inspiration to India's Dalit community.

Just Sex?: The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape


Nicola Gavey - 2005
    This shift in perception has revealed the startling frequency of occurrences of date rape, obscuring the divide between rape and what was once just sex. Just Sex? combines an overview of the existing literature with an analysis of recent research to examine the psychological and cultural implications of this new epidemic. The result is the conclusion that feminist theory on sexual victimisation has gone both too far and not far enough. The reader is presented with a challenging and original perspective on the issues of rape, sex and the body, incorporating subjects including:* rape as a social problem* the social constructionism of sex, subjectivity and the body* heterosexuality under the microscopeThis book succeeds in making a valuable contribution to feminist and social contructionist work on rape that will be of interest to those studying psychology, gender studies, cultural studies and sociology. Just Sex? The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape was selected as a 2005 winner of AWP's (Association for Women in Psychology) distinguished publication award.

Field Notes on the Compassionate Life: A Search for the Soul of Kindness


Marc Barasch - 2005
    He discovers its power to change who we are and the society we have become. Compassion, he concludes, is "a prescription for authentic joy."Can tapping into one simple human trait, hardwired into our nervous system and just waiting to be awakened, transform our lives and the world at large? Could it help us enjoy new levels of happiness and contentment? Exploring his subject through the multiple lenses of psychology and biology, pop culture and theology, history and philosophy, Barasch weaves a stirring, unforgettable account of his search to find within himself and others: the ability to live compassionately.He examines such fascinating questions as: What can we learn from exceptionally empathetic people? Can we increase our kindness quotient with practice? How do we open our hearts to those who do us harm? What if the great driving force of our evolution were actually "survival of the kindest?"Drawing from influences as disparate as Buddhist monks and skeptical neuroscientists, Barasch creates a riveting, persuasive argument that a simple shift in consciousness can have a tremendous, lasting impact on our psyches, our relationships, our health--and the very fate of the Earth.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything


Steven D. Levitt - 2005
    Wade have on violent crime? Freakonomics will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much heralded scholar who studies the stuff and riddles of everyday life -- from cheating and crime to sports and child rearing -- and whose conclusions regularly turn the conventional wisdom on its head. He usually begins with a mountain of data and a simple, unasked question. Some of these questions concern life-and-death issues; others have an admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: freakonomics.Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives -- how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In Freakonomics, they set out to explore the hidden side of ... well, everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents. The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Ku Klux Klan.What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and -- if the right questions are asked -- is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking. Steven Levitt, through devilishly clever and clear-eyed thinking, shows how to see through all the clutter.Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It is true that readers of this book will be armed with enough riddles and stories to last a thousand cocktail parties. But Freakonomics can provide more than that. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.(front flap)

The Southern Question


Antonio Gramsci - 2005
    During ten years of political imprisonment under Mussolini's Fascist government, Gramsci produced The Prison Notebooks, a continued meditation on subjects and relationships first proposed within the pages of this essay. The purpose in re-introducing the essay is to emphasize how Gramsci's analysis of social stratification of Northern and Southern Italy in 1926 is relevant to current discussions about state formation, diasporas, and strategic alliances.

The Wisdom of Love: Toward a Shared Inner Life


Jacob Needleman - 2005
    . . awaken us: Body and Soul to a greater unknown.” Further, what is the work which will sustain a love over a lifetime? By searching for the sacred with our lover we might well find the divine within them. Philosopher and teacher Jacob Needleman suggests love can be a reflection of our spiritual being. He asserts that by the time “we are living together something beyond passion is required;” something intentional and conscious is needed.In The Wisdom of Love, philosopher Jacob Needleman draws wisdom from myth, religion, philosophy and sacred poetry in an exploration of that which brings two people together in love — of what love is, why we need to give it and receive it, and how it can be sustained beyond the passion and mystery that first draws us together.

Domestic Violence at the Margins: Readings on Race, Class, Gender, and Culture


Natalie J. SokoloffKathryn Laughon - 2005
    Campbell, Anna D. Wolf Chair, Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing"An exciting and powerful collection that eloquently critiques some of the current thinking in domestic violence and raises key concerns for advocates and scholars working in the area."—Sujata Warrier, president, board of directors, Manavi: An organization for South Asian women"Sokoloff has assembled an impressive array of authors who challenge us to ‘think outside of our contemporary domestic violence box.’"—Angela M. Moore Parmley, chief, violence and victimization research division, National Institute of JusticeThis groundbreaking anthology reorients the field of domestic violence research by bringing long-overdue attention to the structural forms of oppression in communities marginalized by race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or social class.Reprints of the most influential recent work in the field as well as more than a dozen newly commissioned essays explore theoretical issues, current research, service provision, and activism among Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, Jewish Americans, and lesbians. The volume rejects simplistic analyses of the role of culture in domestic violence by elucidating the support systems available to battered women within different cultures, while at the same time addressing the distinct problems generated by that culture. Together, the essays pose a compelling challenge to stereotypical images of battered women that are racist, homophobic, and xenophobic.The most up-to-date and comprehensive picture of domestic violence available, this anthology is an essential text for courses in sociology, criminology, social work, and women’s studies. Beyond the classroom, it provides critical information and resources for professionals working in domestic violence services, advocacy, social work, and law enforcement.

When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment


Mark A.R. Kleiman - 2005
    Even as the prisoner head count continues to rise, crime has stopped falling, and poor people and minorities still bear the brunt of both crime and punishment. When Brute Force Fails explains how we got into the current trap and how we can get out of it: to cut both crime and the prison population in half within a decade. Mark Kleiman demonstrates that simply locking up more people for lengthier terms is no longer a workable crime-control strategy. But, says Kleiman, there has been a revolution--largely unnoticed by the press--in controlling crime by means other than brute-force incarceration: substituting swiftness and certainty of punishment for randomized severity, concentrating enforcement resources rather than dispersing them, communicating specific threats of punishment to specific offenders, and enforcing probation and parole conditions to make community corrections a genuine alternative to incarceration. As Kleiman shows, "zero tolerance" is nonsense: there are always more offenses than there is punishment capacity. But, it is possible--and essential--to create focused zero tolerance, by clearly specifying the rules and then delivering the promised sanctions every time the rules are broken. Brute-force crime control has been a costly mistake, both socially and financially. Now that we know how to do better, it would be immoral not to put that knowledge to work.

No Place for Children: Voices from Juvenile Detention


Steve Liss - 2005
    Most are nonviolent offenders. Many have mental health or substance abuse problems. All have been failed by some combination of their families, schools, churches, and communities. But instead of addressing these young people’s needs for treatment, rehabilitation, and basic nurturing, we lock them away in an overburdened juvenile justice system that can do little more than warehouse troubled children. This courageous work of photojournalism goes inside the system to offer an intimate, often disturbing view of children’s experiences in juvenile detention. Steve Liss photographed and interviewed young detainees, their parents, and detention and probation officers in Laredo, Texas. His striking photographs reveal that these are vulnerable children—sometimes as young as ten—coping with a detention environment that most adults would find harsh. In the accompanying text, he brings in the voices of the young people who describe their already fractured lives and fragile dreams, as well as the words of their parents and juvenile justice workers who express frustration at not having more resources with which to help these kids. As Marian Wright Edelman asks in the foreword, “What does it say about us that the only thing our nation will guarantee every child is a costly jail or detention cell, while refusing them a place in Head Start or after-school child care, summer jobs, and other needed supports?” In the best tradition of photojournalism, No Place for Children is a call to action on behalf of America’s at-risk youth.

How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic


George A. Reisch - 2005
    in the 1930s. It follows its de-politicization by a convergence of intellectual, cultural and political forces in the 1950s. The volume will be of interest to philosophers and historians of science, as well as scholars of Cold War studies.

Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers


Christian Smith - 2005
    Very few such efforts pay serious attention to the role of religion and spirituality in the lives of American adolescents. But many teenagersare very involved in religion. Surveys reveal that 35% attend religious services weekly and another 15% attend at least monthly. 60% say that religious faith is important in their lives. 40% report that they pray daily. 25% say that they have been born again. Teenagers feel good about thecongregations they belong to. Some say that faith provides them with guidance and resources for knowing how to live well. What is going on in the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers? What do they actually believe? What religious practices do they engage in? Do they expect to remainloyal to the faith of their parents? Or are they abandoning traditional religious institutions in search of a new, more authentic spirituality? This book attempts to answer these and related questions as definitively as possible. It reports the findings of The National Study of Youth and Religion, the largest and most detailed such study ever undertaken. The NYSR conducted a nationwide telephone survey of teens and significant caregivers, as well as nearly 300 in-depth face-to-face interviews with a sample of the population that was surveyed. The results show that religion and spiritualityare indeed very significant in the lives of many American teenagers. Among many other discoveries, they find that teenagers are far more influenced by the religious beliefs and practices of their parents and caregivers than commonly thought. They refute the conventional wisdom that teens arespiritual but not religious. And they confirm that greater religiosity is significantly associated with more positive adolescent life outcomes. This eagerly-awaited volume not only provides an unprecedented understanding of adolescent religion and spirituality but, because teenagers serve asbellwethers for possible future trends, it affords an important and distinctive window through which to observe and assess the current state and future direction of American religion as a whole.

America's "War on Terrorism"


Michel Chossudovsky - 2005
    This title states that the 'war on terrorism' is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus.

Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History


Ian Baucom - 2005
    Ian Baucom revisits, in unprecedented detail, the Zong atrocity, the ensuing court cases, reactions to the event and trials, and the business and social dealings of the Liverpool merchants who owned the ship. Drawing on the work of an astonishing array of literary and social theorists, including Walter Benjamin, Giovanni Arrighi, Jacques Derrida, and many others, he argues that the tragedy is central not only to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the political and cultural archives of the black Atlantic but also to the history of modern capital and ethics. To apprehend the Zong tragedy, Baucom suggests, is not to come to terms with an isolated atrocity but to encounter a logic of violence key to the unfolding history of Atlantic modernity. Baucom contends that the massacre and the trials that followed it bring to light an Atlantic cycle of capital accumulation based on speculative finance, an economic cycle that has not yet run its course. The extraordinarily abstract nature of today’s finance capital is the late-eighteenth-century system intensified. Yet, as Baucom highlights, since the late 1700s, this rapacious speculative culture has had detractors. He traces the emergence and development of a counter-discourse he calls melancholy realism through abolitionist and human-rights texts, British romantic poetry, Scottish moral philosophy, and the work of late-twentieth-century literary theorists. In revealing how the Zong tragedy resonates within contemporary financial systems and human-rights discourses, Baucom puts forth a deeply compelling, utterly original theory of history: one that insists that an eighteenth-century atrocity is not past but present within the future we now inhabit.

Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq


Ghaith Abdul-Ahad - 2005
    The Pentagon's largely successful effort to embed the press with the troops has served to obscure much of the truth of the War in Iraq, a point that is vividly illustrated by this collection of photographs by four independent photojournalists, whose refusal to be embedded have allowed them to capture images of the war not commonly seen in mainstr

Shattering the Glass: The Dazzling History of Women's Basketball from the Turn of the Century to the Present


Pamela Grundy - 2005
    Some facts about women's basketball today: - Globally, basketball is the most popular sport among female teens, according to the International Basketball Federation- The women's college championship game in 2003 was the most watched sporting event in the history of ESPN- According to the NCAA, 31% of all consumers between the age of 9 and 55 follow women's college basketball- In the 1990s, the number of girls playing on interscholastic basketball teams increased by 40%, to nearly 3 million players

Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide


Yiannis Papadakis - 2005
    Now for the first time Yiannis Papadakis, firmly planted in the Greek Cypriot world, sets out to discover "The Other"-- the much maligned Turks. Papadakis delves into the two communities, locked in their mutually contemptuous embrace, to explore their common humanity and to understand what has divided them.

The Re-enchantment Of The West: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture and Occulture


Christopher Partridge - 2005
    This work (the first of two volumes) challenges this thesis and introduces the reader to the principal theories and debates surrounding the state of religion in the West (including secularization, sacralization, Easternization and the development of New Religious Movements).As a book about emergent spirituality in the contemporary West, this books focuses on the nature, evolution and significance of new forms of religion and alternative spiritualities. Part one provides the theoretical background and guides the reader through some of the principal debates. After an overview of the secularization thesis, which argues that the West is becoming increasingly disenchanted, the second chapter turns to the sociological analysis of new religions and alternative spiritualities. Chapter three constructs a general theory of the re-enchantment of the West, while in chapter four the author pursues some of the principal lines of thought raised by the thesis which suggests the existence of an 'occulture.' In chapter five, the significant influence of the East will be examined. The last two chapters will elucidate the role of literature, film, and music in the re-enchantment of the West.

Sorry, Everybody: An Apology to the World for the Re-Election of George W. Bush


James Zetlen - 2005
    The apologies range from the silly to the sublime, and their collected effect is awesome; a heart-stopping, inspiring, and hopeful portrait of America--or at least around half of it. Foreword by Ted Rall, cartoonist and columnist for Universal Press Syndicate.

The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America


Xavier de Souza Briggs - 2005
    The truth, however, is that local communities have a long history of ambivalence toward new arrivals and minorities. Persistent patterns of segregation by race and income still exist in housing and schools, along with a growing emphasis on rapid metropolitan development (sprawl) that encourages upwardly mobile families to abandon older communities and their problems. This dual pattern is becoming increasingly important as America grows more diverse than ever and economic inequality increases. Two recent trends compel new attention to these issues. First, the geography of race and class represents a crucial litmus test for the new "regionalism"—the political movement to address the linked fortunes of cities and suburbs. Second, housing has all but disappeared as a major social policy issue over the past two decades. This timely book shows how unequal housing choices and sprawling development create an unequal geography of opportunity. It emerges from a project sponsored by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University in collaboration with the Joint Center for Housing Studies and the Brookings Institution. The contributors—policy analysts, political observers, social scientists, and urban planners—document key patterns, their consequences, and how we can respond, taking a hard look at both successes and failures of the past. Place still matters, perhaps more than ever. High levels of segregation shape education and job opportunity, crime and insecurity, and long-term economic prospects. These problems cannot be addressed effectively if society assumes that segregation will take care of itself. Contributors include William Apgar (Harvard University), Judith Bell (PolicyLink), Angela Glover Blackwell (PolicyLink), Allegra Calder (Harvard), Karen Chapple (Cal-Berkeley), Camille Charles (Penn), Mary Cunningham (Urban Institute), Casey Dawkins (Virginia Tech), Stephanie DeLuca (Johns Hopkins), John Goering (CUNY), Edward Goetz (U. of Minnesota), Bruce Katz (Brookings), Barbara Lukermann (U. of Minnesota), Gerrit Knaap (U. of Maryland), Arthur Nelson (Virginia Tech), Rolf Pendall (Cornell), Susan J. Popkin (Urban Institute), James Rosenbaum (Northwestern), Stephen L. Ross (U. of Connecticut), Mara Sidney (Rutgers), Phillip Tegeler (Poverty and Race Research Action Council), Tammy Tuck (Northwestern), Margery Austin Turner (Urban Institute), William Julius Wilson (Harvard).

American Orphan-The Life And Times Of Roger Dean Kiser


Roger Dean Kiser - 2005
    The pain, suffering and mental anguish is not easy to read. These stories tell of my feelings. How I took that suffering boldly and how I tried, as best I could, to ease the pain of others. The abuse, hurt and pain I suffered as a child has never left my mind and I feel it as strongly today as I did when I was a child. Forever these memories live with me as a reminder of where I came from and who I am. If the quote above is indeed true, then why I did not turn out to be an abuser. Many who read my stories of my abusive childhood marvel at how I could become a contributing member of society. How I can become a published author with only a 6th grade education, how I can focus on the horrible abuse, and how I earnestly strive, through my books and my media coverage, to seek public and government reform. How can I help others when so much in me goes unhealed? So, why did I not turn out to be an abuser myself ? It is because I could no longer stand to see the pain abuse causes in the hearts and mind of my fellow man. I know the desperation very well. I was there and it happened to me. I cannot recall even one instance where I physically abused my children. I suppose this is because the abuse, the hurt and the pain that I suffered as a child has left such a devastating effect on me I promised myself I would never do this to my children. I find I make that conscious decision everyday. My children are grown and have children of their own. Now, I reaffirm my decision for my grandchildren s sake. I choose not to abuse. It is a decision that I make every day of my life. I help others because I have no choice. When I see the pain of others, my own past reappears and it hurts me so badly. I see myself in their faces, I understand their mental torture, and I know their hopelessness. I need to let them know that I am here and I am a friend. I understand because I have been wh

Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States


Sheila Jasanoff - 2005
    Debates about genetically modified organisms, cloning, stem cells, animal patenting, and new reproductive technologies crowd media headlines and policy agendas. Less noticed, but no less important, are the rifts that have appeared among leading Western nations about the right way to govern innovation in genetics and biotechnology. These significant differences in law and policy, and in ethical analysis, may in a globalizing world act as obstacles to free trade, scientific inquiry, and shared understandings of human dignity.In this magisterial look at some twenty-five years of scientific and social development, Sheila Jasanoff compares the politics and policy of the life sciences in Britain, Germany, the United States, and in the European Union as a whole. She shows how public and private actors in each setting evaluated new manifestations of biotechnology and tried to reassure themselves about their safety.Three main themes emerge. First, core concepts of democratic theory, such as citizenship, deliberation, and accountability, cannot be understood satisfactorily without taking on board the politics of science and technology. Second, in all three countries, policies for the life sciences have been incorporated into nation-building projects that seek to reimagine what the nation stands for. Third, political culture influences democratic politics, and it works through the institutionalized ways in which citizens understand and evaluate public knowledge. These three aspects of contemporary politics, Jasanoff argues, help account not only for policy divergences but also for the perceived legitimacy of state actions.

Situational Analysis: Grounded Theory After the Postmodern Turn


Adele E. Clarke - 2005
    Extending Anselm Strauss′s ecological social worlds/arenas/discourses framework, this book offers researchers three kinds of maps that place an emphasis on the range of differences rather than commonalities, as found via the traditional grounded theory approach. These maps include situational, social worlds/arena, and positional maps.

How the Other Half Worships


Camilo José Vergara - 2005
    It is hard not to be impressed by the standard of living in the nation’s most affluent suburban and urban neighborhoods. Yet, scattered amid stretches that abound in wealth, the country is home to neighborhoods rife with violence, poverty, segregation, and decay. Within these blighted urban landscapes, however, there is at least one notable example of plenty: churches. They do not always appear as traditional houses of worship, but often emerge from the retrofitted shells of former storefronts, garages, factories, warehouses, domestic dwellings, and public institutions. Regardless of the façade, churches populate America’s poorest neighborhoods.Bringing together more than 300 richly textured color photographs and a series of candid interviews with pastors, church officials, and congregation members, this extraordinary book explores the conditions, beliefs, and practices that shape the churches and the lives of the nation’s urban poor. Over a period of thirty years, sociologist and photographer Camilo José Vergara repeatedly visited these places of worship and the eclectic mix of buildings that house them. In twenty-one cities located in ten states across the country, photographic sequences coupled with insightful narrative show how ordinary structures assume, modify, and shed a religious character, how traditional churches—if they fail to adapt to new congregations—are demolished, and how new churches are designed and built from the ground up.Vergara pays special attention to the objects, texts, and imagery that religious leaders make use of to create environments that inspire devotion. Pastors of developing congregations often arrive as crusaders, with missions that cannot be served by traditional religious iconography, and with budgets that force them to use inexpensive materials. In some cases, pastors bring objects of worship from their home towns in places such as Mexico, Puerto Rico, Africa, and the West Indies. Despite the idiosyncratic features and folk decoration that distinguish ghetto churches from one another, however, Vergara shows that, for the most part, they are driven by similar religious agendas. They tend to preach about resilience, avoid involving themselves in national and international events, and consider their truths to be absolute and eternal.A powerful, poignant, and visually arresting portrait, How the Other Half Worships stands as a stark witness to how churches are being rebuilt in the dilapidated streets of America’s cities and how religion is being reinvented by the nation’s poor.

The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaitre, Einstein, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology


John Farrell - 2005
    Such a boost came in the first half of the twentieth century, when an obscure Belgian priest put his mind to deciphering the nature of the cosmos. Is the universe evolving to some unforeseen end, or is it static, as the Greeks believed? The debate has preoccupied thinkers from Heraclitus to the author of the Upanishads, from the Mayans to Einstein. The Day Without Yesterday covers the modern history of an evolving universe, and how Georges Lemaîe convinced a generation of thinkers to embrace the notion of cosmic expansion and the theory that this expansion could be traced backward to the cosmic origins, a starting point for space and time that Lemaîe called "the day without yesterday." Lemaîe's skill with mathematics and the equations of relativity enabled him to think much more broadly about cosmology than anyone else at the time, including Einstein. Lemaîe proposed the expanding model of the universe to Einstein, who rejected it. Had Einstein followed Lemaîe's thinking, he could have predicted the expansion of the universe more than a decade before it was actually discovered.

The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia


Piers Vitebsky - 2005
    Images carved into rocks and tattooed on the skin of mummies hint at ancient ideas about the reindeer's magical ability to carry the human soul on flights to the sun. These images pose one of the great mysteries of prehistory: the "reindeer revolution," in which Siberian native peoples tamed and saddled a species they had previously hunted.Drawing on nearly twenty years of field work among the Eveny in northeast Siberia, Piers Vitebsky shows how Eveny social relations are formed through an intense partnership with these extraordinary animals as they migrate over the swamps, ice sheets, and mountain peaks of what in winter is the coldest inhabited region in the world. He reveals how indigenous ways of knowing involve a symbiotic ecology of mood between humans and reindeer, and he opens up an unprecedented understanding of nomadic movement, place, memory, habit, and innovation.The Soviets' attempts to settle the nomads in villages undermined their self-reliance and mutual support. In an account both harrowing and funny, Vitebsky shows the Eveny's ambivalence toward productivity plans and medals and their subversion of political meetings designed to control them. The narrative gives a detailed and tender picture of how reindeer can act out or transform a person's destiny and of how prophetic dreaming about reindeer fills a gap left by the failed assurances of the state.Vitebsky explores the Eveny experience of the cruelty of history through the unfolding and intertwining of their personal lives. The interplay of domestic life and power politics is both intimate and epic, as the reader follows the diverging fate of three charismatic but very different herding families through dangerous political and economic reforms. The book's gallery of unforgettable personalities includes shamans, psychics, wolves, bears, dogs, Communist Party bosses, daredevil aviators, fire and river spirits, and buried ancestors. The Reindeer People is a vivid and moving testimony to a Siberian native people's endurance and humor at the ecological limits of human existence.

A Colored Woman In A White World


Mary Church Terrell - 2005
    Active in both the civil rights movement and the campaign for women’s suffrage, Terrell was a leading spokesperson for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, and the first black woman appointed to the District of Columbia Board of Education and the American Association of University Women. She was also a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In this autobiography, originally published in 1940, Terrell describes the important events and people in her life.Terrell began her career as a teacher, first at Wilberforce College and then at a high school in Washington, D.C., where she met her future husband, Robert Heberton Terrell. After marriage, the women’s suffrage movement attracted her interests and before long she became a prominent lecturer at both national and international forums on women’s rights. A gifted speaker, she went on to pursue a career on the lecture circuit for close to thirty years, delivering addresses on the critical social issues of the day, including segregation, lynching, women’s rights, the progress of black women, and various aspects of black history and culture. Her talents and many leadership positions brought her into close contact with influential black and white leaders, including Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Ingersoll, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams, and others.With a new introduction by Debra Newman Ham, professor of history at Morgan State University, this new edition of Mary Church Terrell’s autobiography will be of interest to students and scholars of both women’s studies and African American history.

In The Game: Gay Athletes And The Cult Of Masculinity


Eric Anderson - 2005
    By detailing individual experiences, Anderson shows how these athletes are emerging from their athletic closets and contesting the dominant norms of masculinity. From the locker rooms of high school sports, where the atmosphere of don't ask, don't tell often exists, to the unique circumstances that gay athletes encounter in professional team sports, this book analyzes the agency that openly gay athletes possess to change their environments.

Foucault and the Government of Disability


Shelley Lynn Tremain - 2005
    Over the last thirty years, politicized conceptions of disability have precipitated significant social change, including the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, the redesign of urban landscapes, the appearance of closed-captioning on televisions, and the growing recognition that disabled people constitute a marginalized and disenfranchised constituency. The provocative essays in this volume respond to Foucault's call to question what is regarded as natural, inevitable, ethical, and liberating, while they challenge established understandings of Foucault's analyses and offer fresh approaches to his work. The book's roster of distinguished international contributors represents a broad range of disciplines and perspectives, making this a timely and necessary addition to the burgeoning field of disability studies.

Reforming Punishment: Psychological Limits to the Pains of Imprisonment


Craig Haney - 2005
    Today the U.S. imprisons more people than any other nation. Prisons cause prisoners to make adaptations so they can take the long-term exposure to pain and these adaptations cause personal and social problems, both while offenders are imprisoned and after the offenders are released. Haney presents evidence that problems in prisons - which include overcrowding, violence, and sexual assault - are the result of poor design, lack of funding, and an outdated understanding of individual punishment that does not acknowledge the context in which crimes are perpetrated.

Samoa, a Hundred Years Ago and Long Before: Together with Notes on the Cults and Customs of Twenty-Three Other Islands in the Pacific


George Turner - 2005
    A comprehensive history of the geography and people of Samoa

The American Civilizing Process


Stephen Mennell - 2005
    But isthat how the rest of the world sees it? And if not, why not? Stephen Mennell leads up to such contemporary questions through a careful study of the whole span of American development, from the first settlers to the American Empire. He takes a novel approach, analysing the USA's experience in the light of Norbert Elias's theory of civilizing (and decivilizing) processes. Drawing comparisons between the USA and other countries of the world, the topics discussed include: * American manners and lifestyles * Violence in American society * The impact of markets on American social character * American expansion, from the frontier to empire * The 'curse of the American Dream' and increasing inequality * The religiosity of American life Mennell shows how the long-term experience of Americans has been of growing more and more powerful in relation to their neighbours. This has had all-pervasive effects on the way they see themselves, their perception of the rest of the world, and how the rest of the world sees them. Mennell's compelling and provocative account will appeal to anyone concerned about America's role in the world today, including students and scholars of American politics and society.

Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany


Dagmar Herzog - 2005
    What exactly were Nazism's sexual politics? Were they repressive for everyone, or were some individuals and groups given sexual license while others were persecuted, tormented, and killed? How do we make sense of the evolution of postwar interpretations of Nazism's sexual politics? What do we make of the fact that scholars from the 1960s to the present have routinely asserted that the Third Reich was sex-hostile?In response to these and other questions, Sex after Fascism fundamentally reconceives central topics in twentieth-century German history. Among other things, it changes the way we understand the immense popular appeal of the Nazi regime and the nature of antisemitism, the role of Christianity in the consolidation of postfascist conservatism in the West, the countercultural rebellions of the 1960s-1970s, as well as the negotiations between government and citizenry under East German communism. Beginning with a new interpretation of the Third Reich's sexual politics and ending with the revisions of Germany's past facilitated by communism's collapse, Sex after Fascism examines the intimately intertwined histories of capitalism and communism, pleasure and state policies, religious renewal and secularizing trends.A history of sexual attitudes and practices in twentieth-century Germany, investigating such issues as contraception, pornography, and theories of sexual orientation, Sex after Fascism also demonstrates how Germans made sexuality a key site for managing the memory and legacies of Nazism and the Holocaust.

The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe


David Ost - 2005
    And yet, within a few short years, they had clearly lost. An oppressive communist regime gave way to a capitalist society that embraced economic and political inequality, leaving many workers frustrated and angry. Their leaders first ignored them, then began to fear them, and finally tried to marginalize them. In turn, workers rejected their liberal leaders, opening the way for right-wing nationalists to take control of Solidarity.Ost tells a fascinating story about the evolution of postcommunist society in Eastern Europe. Informed by years of fieldwork in Polish factory towns, scores of interviews with workers, labor activists, and politicians, and an exhaustive reading of primary sources, his new book gives voice to those who have not been heard. But even more, Ost proposes a novel theory about the role of anger in politics to show why such voices matter, and how they profoundly affect political outcomes. Drawing on Poland's experiences, Ost describes lessons relevant to democratization throughout Eastern Europe and to democratic theory in general.

Broken Children, Grown-Up Pain (Revised): Understanding the Effects of Your Wounded Past


Paul Hegstrom - 2005
    Emotional isolation. Self-loathing. Immaturity. Abusive actions.These are just some of the damaging fragments that remain embedded within our personalities, behaviors, and souls when we are broken as children. The memory of the past may seem distant and clouded, but within its scars deep wounds remain that continue to inflict pain upon our adult lives--and often end up spilling into the lives of others.In Broken Children, Grown-Up Pain, Paul Hegstrom, author of Angry Men and the Women Who Love Them, shows us the scars from his broken childhood and shares practical and proven methods for facing and dealing with the pain of the past. By using scientific research, psychological studies, and biblical principles--especially those found in the Jewish model of raising children--he points us to the place of healing where we are finally free to pursue authentic relationships and build healthy emotional intimacy with others.This updated version of Broken Children, Grown-Up Pain is an excellent resource for pastors, teachers, counselors, psychologists, parents, or anyone wounded by an abusive past.

Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson


Bradley J. Birzer - 2005
    One can find his influence throughout the twentieth-century Catholic Right. Poet and social critic T. S. Eliot considered him the foremost thinker of his generation, and the founder of American conservatism, Russell Kirk, wrote that he had been “saturated in Dawsonian historical studies [and] my own books reflect Dawson’s concepts.”Dawson’s reputation declined dramatically during the cultural shifts accompanying Vatican II, and few remembered the English Catholic in the final decades of the twentieth century. A revival of interest of Dawson and his body of work increased dramatically in the last years of John Paul II’s and the beginning of Benedict’s pontificates. This book offers the first study of Dawson’s life and thought as a whole. It is especially poignant as a post–9/11 reexamination of the meaning of Western civilization.Sanctifying the World was named by biographer Joseph Pearce as the best book of 2008 and the National Catholic Register named it one of the top eleven books of the year.

Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour


Michael Billig - 2005
    Both a significant work of scholarship and a novel contribution to the understanding of the humourous, this is a seriously engaging book' - David Inglis, University of Aberdeen This delightful book tackles the prevailing assumption that laughter and humour are inherently good. In developing a critique of humour the author proposes a social theory that places humour - in the form of ridicule - as central to social life. Billig argues that all cultures use ridicule as a disciplinary means to uphold norms of conduct and conventions of meaning. Historically, theories of humour reflect wider visions of politics, morality and aesthetics. For example, Bergson argued that humour contains an element of cruelty while Freud suggested that we deceive ourselves about the true nature of our laughter. Billig discusses these and other theories, while using the topic of humour to throw light on the perennial social problems of regulation, control and emancipation.

Strangers in a Strange Land: Humans in an Urbanizing World


Douglas S. Massey - 2005
    Despite this, most humans live in dense urban environments. "As biological organisms," Massey writes, "we are indeed strangers in a strange land."Strangers in a Strange Land is part of the Contemporary Societies series.

Death by Design: Capital Punishment as a Social Psychological System


Craig Haney - 2005
    Relying heavily on his own research and that of other social scientists, Haney suggests that these social psychological forces enablepersons to engage in behavior from which many of them otherwise would refrain. However, by facilitating death sentencing in these ways, this inter-related set of social psychological forces also undermines the reliability and authenticity of the process, and compromises the fairness of its outcomes.Because these social psychological forces are systemic in nature - built into the very system of death sentencing itself - Haney concludes by suggesting a number of inter-locking reforms, derived directly from empirical research on capital punishment, that are needed to increase the fairness andreliability of the process. The historic and ongoing public debate over the death penalty takes place not only in courtrooms, but also in classrooms, offices, and living rooms. This timely book offers stimulating insights into capital punishment for professionals and students working in psychology, law, criminology, sociology, and cultural area studies. As capital punishment receives continued attention in the media, it is also a necessary and provocative guide that empowers all readers to come to their own conclusions about the death penalty.

Environmental Sociology: From Analysis to Action


Leslie King - 2005
    This environmental sociology reader emphasizes utilizing the sociological imagination to examine the race, class, gender, and other power dimensions that intersect environmental issues. It includes excerpts from recently published pieces that use various sociological perspectives, especially critical frameworks, to examine a wide range of topics-from the globalization of hazardous wastes and industries to mountaintop removal for mining to the construction of nature in a television sitcom. This second edition, like the first, aims to engage undergraduate students, and includes nine new selections chosen from recent work. A section on social constructionism has been added, and the section on science, risk, and health has been expanded to mirror the increased interest in that field. The new edition also includes a chapter on climate change and new selections in the section on 'Thinking about Change/Working for Change, ' which helps students see how individuals can affect the future of the planet through their actions.

Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity


Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar - 2005
    Though vilified as extremist and marginal, they were formidable agents of influence and change during the civil rights era and ultimately shaped the Black Power movement. In this fresh study, drawing on deep archival research and interviews with key participants, Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar reconsiders the commingled stories of — and popular reactions to — the Nation of Islam, Black Panthers, and mainstream civil rights leaders. Ogbar finds that many African Americans embraced the seemingly contradictory political agenda of desegregation and nationalism. Indeed, black nationalism was far more favorably received among African Americans than historians have previously acknowledged. Black Power reveals a civil rights movement in which the ideals of desegregation through nonviolence and black nationalism marched side by side.Ogbar concludes that Black Power had more lasting cultural consequences among African Americans and others than did the civil rights movement, engendering minority pride and influencing the political, cultural, and religious spheres of mainstream African American life for the next three decades.

Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence


Hector Avalos - 2005
    Hector Avalos offers a new theory for the role of religion in violent conflicts. Starting with the premise that most violence is the result of real or perceived scarce resources, Avalos persuasively argues that religion creates new scarcities on the basis of unverifiable or illusory criteria. Through a careful analysis of the fundamental texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Dr. Avalos explains how four "scarce" resources have figured repeatedly in creating religious violence: sacred space (churches, temples, holy cities); the creation of holy scriptures (exclusive revelations); group privilege (chosen people, the predestined select few); and salvation (only some are saved). Thus, Avalos shows, religious violence is often the most unnecessary violence of all since the scarce resources over which religious conflicts ensue are not actually scarce or need not be scarce.Comparing violence in religious and nonreligious contexts, Avalos makes the compelling argument that if we condemn violence caused by scarce resources as morally objectionable, then we must consider even more objectionable violence provoked by alleged scarcities that cannot be proven to exist. Moreover, he shows how many modern academic biblical scholars and scholars of religion maintain the value of sacred texts despite their violence.This serious philosophical examination of the roots of religious violence adds much to our understanding of a perennial source of widespread human suffering.

Afterwar: Veterans from a World in Conflict


Lori Grinker - 2005
    It is a portrait documenting the deep physical and psychological effects on the veterans whose bodies and minds are changed forever. It is not the “politics” of a particular war that the people in this work represent, but rather a portrayal of our culture of warring and the aftermath of war in human terms.Organized in reverse chronological order, from the most recently ended conflicts to the early part of the century, the book includes Sri Lanka, Liberia, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Israel-Palestine, El Salvador, Cambodia, Eritrea-Ethiopia, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, Lebanon, the Falkland Islands, Vietnam, the Middle East, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Algeria, Indochina, Korea, China, World War II, Spain and World War I.Lori Grinker, born in 1957 in New York, is a member of the photo agency Contact Press Images. Her social-humanistic work has taken her to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, the USSR, Africa and throughout the United States. Her work has been featured in Life, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, People, the Sunday Times Magazine (London), Stern, GEO, French Photo and American Photo. She is the author/photographer of The Invisible Thread: A Portrait of Jewish American Women.Chris Hedges is a former war correspondent in El Salvador, Kosovo, the Balkans, the Middle East and the first Gulf War. He joined the staff of The New York Times in 1990, and he was a member of newspaper’s team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for coverage of global terrorism. He is the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.

Hidden Power: What You Need to Know to Save Our Democracy


Charles Derber - 2005
    Costly wars abroad, a national debt that grows exponentially year after year, and the inability to deliver stable work and essential social services are undermining the legitimacy of the regime -- opening the door to a new period of regime change. Today, new grass roots progressive movements are mobilizing, becoming a catalyst for change. In "Hidden Power, author Charles Derber shows how these movements can transform the political landscape, breaking the Democratic party out of its corporate shell and moving it toward a new unifying vision of how to create real democracy in a world run by big money.

Feminist Methodologies for Critical Researchers: Bridging Differences


Joey Sprague - 2005
    Written in a clear, balanced fashion, Joey Sprague's treatment of qualitative and quantitative methods shows that all can be used effectively by progressive researchers. She describes and evaluates a wide array of methodological options for the production of knowledge. Unique to this volume, Sprague avoids the stereotype that tarnishes all quantitative research as inherently anti-feminist, showing through an analysis of model studies how surveys and experimental designs are being used by critical scholars. She traces how the social organization of the academy has produced a bias against feminist methodology and proposes a program to overcome these limitations. Sprague's book will be of value to scholars of many disciplines, and a essential text or supplement for methods classes."

My Heart Stands in the Hill


Janette Deacon - 2005
    There are archives in Cape Town with thousands of pages of Bushman lore, transcribed painstakingly by language specialists of the 1800s. There's an ever-expanding audience of readers hungry for the wisdom represented by our First Peoples. My Heart Stands in the Hill represents the tragically intertwined journeys of some of these First Peoples and European settlers, the fascinating spiritual travels of /Xam (medicine men) and (rock artists), and the pilgrimage of a modern archaeologist and filmmaker who symbolically return the image of these early South Africans to the landscape that was their home. Craig Foster and Janette Deacon locate significant places described by these people and find rock engravings that record ancient shamanistic experiences connected with rainmaking and other rituals. The viewer/reader is transported to the landscapes through powerful images of the engravings in their setting. Photographs of the /Xam people themselves are brought back to the landscape by projecting the portraits onto the land.

Email to the Universe and Other Alterations of Consciousness


Robert Anton Wilson - 2005
    Tackles a wide array of subjects including: The Passion of the Antichrist; The Celtic Roots of Quantum Theory; Paranoia; Black Magic and Curses; LSD, Dogs and Me; Left and Right: A Non-Euclidean Perspective; Sexual Alchemy; Cheerful Reflections on Death and Dying; and, The Relativity of Reality.

Native American Mythology


Hartley Burr Alexander - 2005
    Hartley Burr Alexander recounts the continent's myths chronologically and region-by-region, offering a remarkably wide range of nomadic sagas, animist myths, cosmogonies and creation myths, end-time prophecies, and other traditional tales.The stories begin in the far North, among Norsemen and Eskimos, and range through the land of the forest dwellers, with extensive representation of tribes such as the Iroquois and Algonquian. Legends from the Gulf region and Great Plains encompass sun worship and trickster pranks, and from the Indians of the mountain and desert come tales of Navajo gods and episodes from the ghost world. The collection concludes among the natives of the Pacific coast, with stories of secret societies, totemism and totemic spirits, and the Raven Cycle — the supernatural lore surrounding the black bird who hung the sun, moon, and stars in the sky, put the salmon in the rivers and the fish in the sea, and amused itself by fooling people with its shape-shifting tricks.

Criminology


Stephen Jones - 2005
    Following a historical path through the development of criminological theories, and with full references to guide the reader to further, more in-depth, study of any particular aspect, this text will be an engaging read for all those studying the subject.

Hunab Ku: 77 Sacred Symbols for Balancing Body and Spirit


Karen Speerstra - 2005
    As an embodiment of harmony and balance, Hunab Ku invites us into the age of consciousness, which is predicted to begin on December 21, 2012.HUNAB KU prepares us for this cosmic awakening by presenting 77 sacred symbols that create an interactive system for learning, healing, and meditation. Beautifully illustrated and exhaustively researched, this virtual pilgrimage invites us to explore artifacts, earthworks, numerological patterns, and archetypes from diverse traditions the world over: ancient Greece, the Americas, Africa, the British Isles, Babylon, India, and beyond. Hunab Ku waits for you at the book’s center, the threshold between our present age and the coming age of enlightenment. Like runes, tarot, and other pathworking systems, the archetypes herein open doors, create bridges, and shed light on our past and our future. These spiritual signposts are all around us and within, waiting to be interpreted. Let HUNAB KU be your guide.A richly illustrated book that draws on cross-cultural ancient symbols, numerology, archetypes, and earthworks, and the chakras.Includes 77 vivid full-color illustrations placed within the framework and palette of the seven chakras.Builds on the growing popularity of José Arguelles’s The Mayan Factor and Carl Johan Calleman’s The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness.

The House I Live in: Race in the American Century


Robert J. Norrell - 2005
    Norrell offers a truly masterful chronicle of American race relations over the last one hundred and fifty years. This scrupulously fair and insightful narrative--the most ambitious and wide-ranging history of its kind--sheds new light on the ideologies, from white supremacy to black nationalism, that have shaped race relations since the Civil War. Norrell argues that it is these ideologies, more thanpolitics or economics, that have sculpted the landscape of race in America. Beginning with Reconstruction, he shows how the democratic values of liberty and equality were infused with new meaning by Abraham Lincoln, only to become meaningless for generations of African Americans as the whitesupremacy movement took shape. The heart of the book paints a vivid portrait of the long, often dangerous struggle of the Civil Rights movement to overcome decades of accepted inequality. Norrell offers fresh appraisals of key Civil Rights figures and dissects the ideas of racists. He offersstriking new insights into black-white history, observing for instance that the Civil Rights movement really began as early as the 1930s, and that contrary to much recent writing, the Cold War was a setback rather than a boost to the quest for racial justice. He also breaks new ground on the role ofpopular culture and mass media in first promoting, but later helping defeat, notions of white supremacy. Though the struggle for equality is far from over, Norrell writes that today we are closer than ever to fulfilling the promise of our democratic values. The House I Live In gives readers thefirst full understanding of how far we have come.

Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures


Lester R. Brown - 2005
    Spreading water shortages and crop-withering heat waves are shrinking grain harvests in more and more countries, making it difficult for the world's farmers to feed 70 million more people each year. The risk is that tightening food supplies could drive up food prices, destabilizing governments in low-income grain-importing countries and disrupting global economic progress. Future security, Brown says, now depends on raising water productivity, stabilizing climate by moving beyond fossil fuels, and stabilizing population by filling the family planning gap and educating young people everywhere.If Osama bin Laden and his colleagues succeed in diverting our attention from the real threats to our future security, they may reach their goals for reasons that even they have not imagined.

Racetalk: Racism Hiding in Plain Sight


Kristen Myers - 2005
    Most people avoid publicly expressing racialized comments in fear of being labeled racist. Much public talk is sugar coated and coded to distance the speaker from the racist message. This study captures behind the scenes commentary-racetalk-that degrades people due to race and ethnicity. Despite racial inroads made over the past several decades, the racetalk in this study evinces old fashioned racist ideas persisting in modern imaginations. These scripts say that African Americans are dangerous. Whites are superior. Latinos are dirty and disposable. Indians are sinister. Slavery is a trivial-if not nostalgic and amusing-historical anomaly that is better forgotten. Private racetalk keeps these old scripts hidden yet alive. Through racetalk, people imbue different racial and ethnic groups with oppositional statuses. Racetalk delineates boundaries between whiteness, blackness, and brownness. Racetalk is a tool used in policing these boundaries. Most people who cross racial/ethnic boundaries through alliances, friendships, and courtships are sanctioned. Nevertheless some people are able to cross more successfully than others. An analysis of the content of racetalk reveals the processes through which people negotiate racial/ethnic meanings and boundaries on a daily basis. In so doing, they often perpetuate the old racial regime but occasionally they challenge it.

Бидний араншин: Гурван Монгол зодолдоно


Д.Баярхүү - 2005
    One of the must reads of modern day people.

High-Profile Crimes: When Legal Cases Become Social Causes


Lynn S. Chancer - 2005
    J. Simpson. The Central Park jogger. Bensonhurst. William Kennedy Smith. Rodney King. These are more than crimes and criminals, more than court cases. They are cultural events that, for better or worse, gave concrete expression to latent social conflicts in American society. In High-Profile Crimes, Lynn Chancer explores how these cases became conflated with larger social causes on a collective level and how this phenomenon has affected the law, the media, and social movements.An astute and incisive chronicle of some of the most polarizing cases of the 1980s and 1990s, High-Profile Crimes shows that their landmark status results from the overlapping interaction of diverse participants. The merging of legal cases and social causes, Chancer argues, has wrought ambivalent effects on both social movements and the law. On the one hand, high-profile crimes offer important opportunities for emotional expression and raise awareness of social issues. But on the other hand, social problems cannot be resolved through the either/or determinations that are the goals of the legal system, creating frustration for those who look to the outcome of these cases for social progress. Guilt or innocence through the lens of the media leads to either defeat or victory for a social cause-a confounding situation that made the O. J. Simpson case, for example, unable to resolve the issues of domestic violence and police racism that it had come to symbolize.Based on nearly two hundred interviews, Chancer's discussions of the infamous Central Park jogger and Bensonhurst cases-as well as the rape trials of William Kennedy Smith and Mike Tyson, the assault cases of Rodney King and Reginald Denny, and, finally, the O. J. Simpson murder trial-provide a convincing, multidimensional and innovative analysis of the most charged public dramas of the last two decades.

Encyclopedia of Anthropology


H. James Birx - 2005
    Also included are relevant articles on geology, paleontology, biology, evolution, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and theology. The contributions are authored by over 250 internationally renowned experts, professors, and scholars from some of the most distinguished museums, universities, and institutes in the world. Special attention is given to human evolution, primate behavior, genetics, ancient civilizations, sociocultural theories, and the value of human language for symbolic communication.

Max Weber: Readings and Commentary on Modernity


Max Kalbeck - 2005
     Gathers Weber's writings in a comprehensive collection, organized by topic. Rejuvenates a central, pivotal theme of Weberian thought: How do we live? and How can we live in the industrial society?" Connects Weber's writings to contemporary issues through modern essays and editorial introductions.

Seeing Sociologically: The Routine Grounds of Social Action


Harold Garfinkel - 2005
    This gap was generated by a Parsonian paradigm that emphasised a scientific approach to sociological description, one that increasingly distanced itself from social phenomena in the increasingly influential ways studied by phenomenologists. It was Garfinkel's idea that phenomenological description, rendered in more empirical and interactive terms, might remedy shortcomings in the reigning Parsonian view. Garfinkel soon gave up the attempt to repair scientific description, and his focus became increasingly empirical until, in 1954, he famously coined the term "Ethnomethodology." However, in this early manuscript can be seen more clearly than in some of his later work the struggle with a conceptual and positivist rendering of social relations that ultimately informed Garfinkel's position. Here we find the sources of his turn toward ethnomethodology, which would influence subsequent generations of sociologists. Essential reading for all social theory scholars and graduate students and for a wider range of social scientists in anthropology, ethnomethodology, and other fields.

Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People


Dorothy E. Smith - 2005
    Concerned with articulating an inclusive sociology that goes beyond looking at a particular group of people from the detached viewpoint of the researcher, this is a method of inquiry for people, incorporating the expert's research and language into everyday experience to examine social relations and institutions. The book begins by examining the foundations of institutional ethnography in women's movements, differentiating it from other related sociologies; the second part offers an ontology of the social; and the third illustrates this ontology through an array of institutional ethnography examples. This will be a foundational text for classes in sociology, ethnography, and women's studies.

The Farewell Chronicles: [How We Really Respond to Death]


Anneli Rufus - 2005
    And while Hallmark sympathy cards and sad movies tell us we should grieve, death arouses a lot of other feelings in us as well -- weird, unnerving, complicated feelings, which we're terrified to talk about because we suspect that, if we did, we would be judged as crazy, cold, unfilial, unfaithful, or immature. So at these crucial times, facing the biggest and most momentous dramas of our lives, we lock away deep inside us our own true responses. In so doing, we cut ourselves off from the rest of the world and from whomever we've lost, from our hearts and minds and from the ultimate drama that is a death in the midst of life. Questioning our sanity, doubting our humanity, we hide, pretend -- and even lie. This book helps us tell the truth -- to ourselves, to the dead, and to each other. Revisiting the deaths of many people she has known -- loved ones, casual acquaintances, children and adults, friends and enemies -- prizewinning journalist Anneli Rufus gives powerful, eloquent voice to everyone who has ever lost anyone and whose reactions wouldn't fit into the standard template of "feel sad, cry, then get over it."

Identities, Boundaries and Social Ties


Charles Tilly - 2005
    It is novel in demonstrating the connections between inequality and de-democratization, between identities and social inequality, and between citizenship and identities. The book treats interpersonal transactions as the basic elements of larger social processes. Tilly shows how personal interactions compound into identities, create and transform social boundaries, and accumulate into durable social ties. He also shows how individual and group dispositions result from interpersonal transactions. Resisting the focus on deliberated individual action, the book repeatedly gives attention to incremental effects, indirect effects, environmental effects, feedback, mistakes, repairs, and unanticipated consequences. Social life is complicated. But, the book shows, it becomes comprehensible once you know how to look at it.