Book picks similar to
Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community by Faye D. Ginsburg
non-fiction
feminism
anthropology
sociology
What Are People For?
Wendell Berry - 1990
Berry talks to the reader as one would talk to a next-door neighbor: never preachy, he comes across as someone offering sound advice. He speaks with sadness of the greedy consumption of this country's natural resources and the grim consequences Americans must face if current economic practices do not change drastically. In the end, these essays offer rays of hope in an otherwise bleak forecast of America's future. Berry's program presents convincing steps for America's agricultural and cultural survival.
Cunt: A Declaration of Independence
Inga Muscio - 1998
Inga Muscio traces the road from honor to expletive, giving women the motivation and tools to claim cunt as a positive and powerful force in their lives. In this fully revised edition, she explores, with candidness and humor, such traditional feminist issues as birth control, sexuality, jealousy between women, and prostitution with a fresh attitude for a new generation of women. Sending out a call for every woman to be the Cunt lovin Ruler of Her Sexual Universe, Muscio stands convention on its head by embracing all things cunt-related. This edition is fully revised with updated resources, a new foreword from sexual pioneer Betty Dodson, and a new afterword by the author.
Feminism Unfinished: A Short, Surprising History of American Women's Movements
Dorothy Sue Cobble - 2014
Also challenging the contemporary “lean-in,” trickle-down feminist philosophy and asserting that women’s histories all too often depoliticize politics, labor issues, and divergent economic circumstances, Dorothy Sue Cobble, Linda Gordon, and Astrid Henry demonstrate that the post-Suffrage women’s movement focused on exploitation of women in the workplace as well as on inherent sexual rights. The authors carefully revise our “wave” vision of feminism, which previously suggested that there were clear breaks and sharp divisions within these media-driven “waves.” Showing how history books have obscured the notable activism by working-class and minority women in the past, Feminism Unfinished provides a much-needed corrective.
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.
Real World Research: A Resource for Social Scientists and Practitioner-Researchers
Colin Robson - 1993
These include teachers, social workers and health service professionals, managers and specialists in business, architects, designers, criminologists and accountants among many others.Real World Research provides a clear route-map of the various steps needed to carry out a piece of applied research to a high professional standard. It is accessible to those without a social science background while providing rigorous and fully up-to-date coverage of contemporary issues and debates. It brings together materials and approaches from different social science disciplines, seeing value in both quantitative and qualitative approaches, as well as their combination in mixed-method designs.
Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men
Michael S. Kimmel - 2008
As he walks with us through dark territories, he points out the significant and reflects on its meaning.”—Mary Pipher, Ph.D., author of Reviving OpheliaThe passage from adolescence to adulthood was once clear. Today, growing up has become more complex and confusing, as young men drift casually through college and beyond—hanging out, partying, playing with tech toys, watching sports. But beneath the appearance of a simple extended boyhood, a more dangerous social world has developed, far away from the traditional signposts and cultural signals that once helped boys navigate their way to manhood—a territory Michael Kimmel has identified as "Guyland."In mapping the troubling social world where men are now made, Kimmel offers a view into the minds and times of America's sons, brothers, and boyfriends, and he works toward redefining what it means to be a man today—and tomorrow. Only by understanding this world and this life stage can we enable young men to chart their own paths, stay true to themselves, and emerge safely from Guyland as responsible and fully formed male adults.
Reproductive Justice: An Introduction
Loretta J. Ross - 2017
Written by two legendary scholar-activists, Reproductive Justice introduces students to an intersectional analysis of race, class, and gender politics. Loretta J. Ross and Rickie Solinger put the lives and lived experience of women of color at the center of the book and use a human rights analysis to show how the discussion around reproductive justice differs significantly from the pro-choice/anti-abortion debates that have long dominated the headlines and mainstream political conflict. Arguing that reproductive justice is a political movement of reproductive rights and social justice, the authors illuminate, for example, the complex web of structural obstacles a low-income, physically disabled woman living in West Texas faces as she contemplates her sexual and reproductive intentions. In a period in which women’s reproductive lives are imperiled, Reproductive Justice provides an essential guide to understanding and mobilizing around women’s human rights in the twenty-first century. Reproductive Justice: A New Vision for the Twenty-First Century publishes works that explore the contours and content of reproductive justice. The series will include primers intended for students and those new to reproductive justice as well as books of original research that will further knowledge and impact society. Learn more at www.ucpress.edu/go/reproductivejustice.
Capoeira: Roots of the Dance-Fight-Game
Nestor Capoeira - 2002
Created by the Africans brought to Brazil as slaves beginning in 1500, capoeira was forbidden by law but survived underground. When open practice was allowed in the 1930s it soon became very popular. Capoeira came to America around 1975, and has become widely recognized by dancers and martial artists. The author discusses capoeira's evolution from Brazilian street play into a way of life. The philosophy of capoeira, and the practical and spiritual benefits of this philosophy, are also discussed. Instructions and exercises in intermediate and advanced skills take up where the author's previous book left off. The book includes 100 black-and-white photos and illustrations.
Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost
Caitlin Zaloom - 2019
At kitchen tables all across the country, parents agonize over whether to burden their children with loans or to sacrifice their own financial security by taking out a second mortgage or draining their retirement savings. Indebted takes readers into the homes of middle-class families throughout the nation to reveal the hidden consequences of student debt and the ways that financing college has transformed family life.Caitlin Zaloom gained the confidence of numerous parents and their college-age children, who talked candidly with her about stressful and intensely personal financial matters that are usually kept private. In this remarkable book, Zaloom describes the profound moral conflicts for parents as they try to honor what they see as their highest parental duty--providing their children with opportunity--and shows how parents and students alike are forced to take on enormous debts and gamble on an investment that might not pay off. What emerges is a troubling portrait of an American middle class fettered by the student finance complex--the bewildering labyrinth of government-sponsored institutions, profit-seeking firms, and university offices that collect information on household earnings and assets, assess family needs, and decide who is eligible for aid and who is not.Superbly written and unflinchingly honest, Indebted breaks through the culture of silence surrounding the student debt crisis, revealing the unspoken costs of sending our kids to college.
Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West
Susan Buck-Morss - 2000
The dream of the twentieth century was the construction of mass utopia. As the century closes, this dream is being left behind; the belief that industrial modernization can bring about the good society by overcoming material scarcity for all has been challenged by the disintegration of European socialism, capitalist restructuring, and ecological constraints. The larger social vision has given way to private dreams of material happiness and to political cynicism.Developing the notion of dreamworld as both a poetic description of a collective mental state and an analytical concept, Susan Buck-Morss attempts to come to terms with mass dreamworlds at the moment of their passing. She shows how dreamworlds became dangerous when their energy was used by the structures of power as an instrument of force against the masses. Stressing the similarities between the East and West and using the end of the Cold War as her point of departure, she examines both extremes of mass utopia, dreamworld and catastrophe.The book is in four parts. Dreamworlds of Democracy asks whether collective sovereignty can ever be democratic. Dreamworlds of History calls for a rethinking of revolution by political and artistic avant-gardes. Dreamworlds of Mass Culture explores the affinities between mass culture's socialist and capitalist forms. An Afterward places the book in the historical context of the author's collaboration with a group of Moscow philosophers and artists over the past two tumultuous decades. The book is an experiment in visual culture, using images as philosophy, presenting, literally, a way of seeing the past. Its pictorial narratives rescue historical data that with the end of the Cold War are threatened with oblivion and challenge common conceptions of what this century was all about.
Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity
Sarah B. Pomeroy - 1975
Though much debated, its position as the basic textbook on women's history in Greece and Rome has hardly been challenged."--Mary Beard, Times Literary Supplement. Illustrations.
Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women
Alexa Albert - 2001
Having worked with homeless prostitutes in Times Square, Albert was intimate with human devastation cause by the sex trade, and curious to see if Nevada’s brothels offered a less harmful model for a business that will always be with us. The Mustang Ranch has never before given an outsider such access, but fear of AIDS was hurting the business, and the Ranch was eager to get publicity for its rigorous standards of sexual hygiene. Albert was drawn into the lives of the women of the Mustang Ranch, and what began as a public-health project evolved into something more intimate and ambitious, a six-year study of the brothel ecosystem, its lessons and significance. The women of the Mustang Ranch poured their stories out to Albert: how they came to be there, their surprisingly deep sense of craft and vocation, how they reconciled their profession with life on the outside. Dr. Albert went as far into this world as it is possible to go — some will say too far — including sitting in on sessions with customers, and the result is a book that puts an unforgettable face on America’s maligned and caricatured subculture.From the Hardcover edition.
When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment
Ryan T. Anderson - 2018
In the space of a year, it's gone from something that most Americans had never heard of to a cause claiming the mantle of civil rights.But can a boy truly be "trapped" in a girl's body? Can modern medicine really "reassign" sex? Is sex something "assigned" in the first place? What's the loving response to a friend or child experiencing a gender-identity conflict? What should our law say on these issues?When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment provides thoughtful answers to all of these questions. Drawing on the best insights from biology, psychology, and philosophy, Ryan T. Anderson offers a balanced approach to the policy issues, a nuanced vision of human embodiment, and a sober and honest survey of the human costs of getting human nature wrong.He reveals a grim contrast between the media's sunny depiction and the often sad realities of gender-identity struggles. He introduces readers to people who tried to "transition" but found themselves no better off. Especially troubling is the suffering felt by adults who were encouraged to transition as children but later came to regret it.And there is a reason that many do regret it. As Anderson shows, the most helpful therapies focus not on achieving the impossible--changing bodies to conform to thoughts and feelings--but on helping people accept and even embrace the truth about their bodies and reality. This discussion will be of particular interest to parents who fear how an ideological school counselor might try to steer their child. The best evidence shows that the vast majority of children naturally grow out of any gender-conflicted phase. But no one knows how new school policies might affect children indoctrinated to believe that they really are trapped in the "wrong" body.Throughout the book, Anderson highlights the various contradictions at the heart of this moment: How it embraces the gnostic idea that the real self is something other than the body, while also embracing the idea that nothing but the physical exists. How it relies on rigid sex stereotypes--in which dolls are for girls and trucks are for boys--while also insisting that gender is purely a social construct, and that there are no meaningful differences between women and men. How it assumes that feelings of identity deserve absolute respect, while the facts of our embodiment do not. How it preaches that people should be free to do as they please and define their own truth--while enforcing a ruthless campaign to coerce anyone who dares to dissent.Everyone has something at stake in today's debates about gender identity. Analyzing education and employment policies, Obama-era bathroom and locker-room mandates, politically correct speech codes and religious-freedom violations, Anderson shows how the law is being used to coerce and penalize those who believe the truth about human nature. And he shows how Americans can begin to push back with principle and prudence, compassion and grace.
Case Study Research and Applications: Design and Methods
Robert K. Yin - 2017
Yin's bestselling text provides a complete portal to the world of case study research. With the integration of 11 applications in this edition, the book gives readers access to exemplary case studies drawn from a wide variety of academic and applied fields. Ultimately, Case Study Research and Applications will guide students in the successful design and use of the case study research method. New to this Edition Includes 11 in-depth applications that show how researchers have implemented case study methods successfully. Increases reference to relativist and constructivist approaches to case study research, as well as how case studies can be part of mixed methods projects. Places greater emphasis on using plausible rival explanations to bolster case study quality. Discusses synthesizing findings across case studies in a multiple-case study in more detail Adds an expanded list of 15 fields that have text or texts devoted to case study research. Sharpens discussion of distinguishing research from non-research case studies. The author brings to light at least three remaining gaps to be filled in the future: how rival explanations can become more routinely integrated into all case study research; the difference between case-based and variable-based approaches to designing and analyzing case studies; and the relationship between case study research and qualitative research.
Thank You for Being Such a Pain: Spiritual Guidance for Dealing with Difficult People
Mark Rosen - 1998
By embracing four fundamental premises and putting into practice the author's many helpful and practical suggestions, you'll acquire the skills and insights necessary for turning around even the most troublesome relationship. What you need to keep in mind is that: (1) nothing in your life happens randomly and your difficulties have a deeper purpose; (2) frustration and even emotional pain are as necessary for your personal and spiritual growth as love and joy; (3) transforming enmity and completing unfinished business may be the most important skills you can learn in life; and (4) when you make an effort to work on your inner self, your outer relationships will be transformed. This groundbreaking book draws upon state-of-the-art psychological principles and timeless spiritual practices from all traditions. Filled with enlightening exercises and entertaining stories, Thank You for Being Such a Pain will forever change the way you see the difficult people in your life . . . as well as the way you see yourself.